Where's That Paper?

If you’re like me, you find yourself frequently searching the web for papers that you have browsed / opened in the past on your computer - basically paper browsing history. Whether it is in the process of writing a paper or searching for existing ideas, you may search for authors of titles of papers that you recall know to have once glimpsed at. At some point, the paper has either been downloaded or added to the favorites bar. In any case, this process is manual and takes up much time (often including frustration). As such, I thought we could all use some code to automate it.

Before I tell you more about what it does, let me touch upon the largest obstacle of any new tool, the learning curve. Rest assured that “"Where's that paper?" required zero training – just install it and continue working as usual – it will guide you without further effort on your end.

The extension is very simple: it identifies when you are reading a scientific paper (according to the domain) and then automatically adds this paper, with the proper author list, year etc., to your favorites bar under a designated folder. Then, when you type a search in the Chrome's search bar for an author or a title, the relevant results from the favorites pop up. One might also explicitly browse in the favorites to see all papers read.

The extension automatically works on a list of specified domains that include: eprint.iacr.org, arxiv.org, eccc.weizmann.ac.il, epubs.siam.org, research.microsoft.com, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu, ac.elscdn.com, www.sciencedirect.com, download.springer.com, link.springer.com, delivery.acm.org, proceedings.mlr.press and journals.aps.org.

It is not too difficult to customize the list and additional domains. Reach out to me and I'll add them upon your request!

A bonus feature: Click the extension’s icon and you can download a bib file containing (a nice formatting of) the DBLP bibtex records of all papers added to the favorites.

Security: Most who work in our domain of expertise would be quite concerned with installing extensions and with good reason. The extension I wrote does not leak any information, not to me or to another third party. I have no ulterior motive in developing the extension, originally helping myself, I now see the benefit of sharing it with our community. I do not know how to reassure you that this is indeed the case other than giving you my word and publishing the source code online.