Lean Library

V W2025年11月1日

★★★★★1

This may sound unlikely, but the latest version released yesterday breaks things on youtube pages. It took a lot of switching each of my extensions off and on again to identify that Lean was reliably triggering the problem when it was on (and no other extensions did that). The problems include causing the youtube notifications button to flash up the notifications list window only for second of so and then close it, and causing the "..." 3-dot menus on youtube pages to not open at all. The only solution at the moment is to disable the extension.

Charlotte Heide2025年9月23日

★★★★★2

Overcomplicated SciWheel's original extension layout. At the time of writing this, the Google Chrome extension has once again stopped responding on all of my devices. This has been a reliable tool since I started using it 4 years ago and I recommended it to all of my coworkers, but I cannot in good faith do so until they fix the bugs they've introduced. I've got my qualifying exam in less than 3 weeks and I need to have my citations ironed out ASAP but this rebranding is making it incredibly difficult.

Pritish Patil2025年9月21日

★★★★★1

Like others have said, this is completely unusable and breaks all the nice features Sciwheel had. It also takes over highlighting on all webpages and randomly breaks their alignment, even on sites that have no business being related to references. Also, if there’s no sane way to import PDFs into the library, what is the point of the extension? Super disappointed with this transition—missing out on such basic features, all of which could have been predicted. It’s not rocket science: people want to import PDFs into a reference manager.

Rebecca Eliscu2025年9月16日

★★★★★1

Why won't highlighted portions show up when I visit a paper later? I also can't click to remove highlights that do decide to show up. Generally must more frustrating and less intuitive to use than SciWheel. Very disappointed.

omer azar2025年9月14日

★★★★★1

Terrible switch from Sciwheel to this. Where is all the functionality? why must I go to the lean library workspace in order to add tags? and why for the life of me I cannot shake the affiliation to the university of derby, even though I'm not affiliated with it in any way, and at no point did I indicate in the program that I have something to do with that particular institution? we're not even located in the same country for crying out loud!

Brian Chew2025年9月11日

★★★★★2

What an unfortunate loss of functionality from the SciWheel Extension. The Sciweel Extension let you add a paper you were reading to your projects, add tags, and notes, pretty seamlessly. When you added notes, you could click on the note and add additional information, color code your highlight, or delete the note without having to go through any additional steps. Now most of these actions require you to go through additional dropdown menus, and the process appears to also take longer, with a loading bar remaining on the screen after you've added your note. This was not the case before. The ability to add tags has been completely lost in the new extension, despite being one of the functionalities that added the most utility to the sciwheel extension before. Adding tags let me add more granularity to my reference sorting system, so that I could find which references specific to a certain project were important because they touched on a certain aspect of the project, had an interesting assay, or more. I can no longer specify that. When you add a paper to the project now, clicking the extension icon also no longer tells you what project the paper is in. Sadly one of the few complaints about the last extension, which was that you couldn't add your reference to multiple projects, has also not been improved. There was a popup that might have had some of the lost functionalities, but because it was always on and covered part of the screen, it *frequently* interrupted my ability to read through articles, so I had to disable it. A popup is just not an upgrade from a collapsible interface on my toolbar. Editing to add in that disabling the popup frequently reverts the setting. This user preference does not seem to be retained by the extension. This has been a significant step back on the utility sciwheel provided. It seems the developers are taking note of the disappointed feedback and will reintegrate some of these features, which I am thankful for. I've already noticed that the ability to edit notes has been readded, which was one of major complaints. That gives me hope, though it could still use refinement, because as I mentioned it adds additional steps that did not exist before. I initially gave 1 star because the notes functionality had been completely lost. I've increased to two as that functionality has returned, if albeit a bit less smooth than before. I'm thankful the developers are working to return some of SciWheels Functionality and hope the new extension can catch up with the utility of the legacy extension and maybe improve it more in the future.

Molly Davies2025年9月5日

★★★★★1

SciWheel extension had such better functionality. For example this extension is 'incompatible' when I open article PDFs and doesn't seem to automatically add the PDF when its open access, whereas this was never a problem with SciWheel. Disappointed in this new version and hope that it can be brought up to par with the previous extension.

James Bullard2025年8月27日

★★★★★1

I appreciate the desire to rebrand the extension, but how can users be forced to "upgrade" to lean library extension when the replacement lacks the functionality that the sciwheel extension has? When changes like this are made in the future will so little attention be paid to the users of the product? What does open access have to do with whether or not I find the content relevant? Was any user testing done? What are the specific problems? - The popup is insane, the inability to add to the library by right click, the notes and highlight functionality ... A better question is probably, what were the reasons for changing the existing functionality? Why was it changed? What features were added? Were there critical security patches that were necessary? Why is the switchover mandatory? I have been quite happy with sciwheel and had got many others on the product but it is hard to interpret this change as anything other than a change in priorities that bodes ill for the future.

Michael Dew2025年8月14日

★★★★★1

Sciwheel was a much better extension. It was easy to add notes to previous highlights and easy to edit highlights, and there was a mobile app, which I found useful for bus rides. Now, if I don't add a note when I create a highlight, I can't add one later. Often, the when I try clicking on a highlight I have previously made, it won't let me, or I won't be able to delete it. I don't appreciate the "We found an open access version" pop-up, because I am usually already on a version I have access to through my insitutiton. I was just on an article and the extension kept turning on and off.

Jennifer Korchak2025年8月8日

★★★★★1

This went from SciWheel's completely unobtrusive format to the feel of pop-up advertisements. Please allow for access to the legacy version of the extension.