A Rapid Round of UI Changes

Every now and then, we hear someone say, “Scholar never changes!” We, of course, know otherwise. But we do understand how it can be hard to notice gradual changes in someone you spend a lot of time with. To give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain, here are some of the changes that we have rolled out recently.

Author profiles

The citation histogram on the profile page can now be expanded to show  a larger and more detailed version when you click on it.  It's also available on phones and tablets - click on the "Citation indices" header to show the graph on smaller screens.  The citation histogram on each article's page can now be scrolled to display the entire range of years.

The "Follow" button on a public profile is now gray when you're already following the author.  It's still an inviting blue if you're not following them.

By popular demand, we've reinstated the "Articles 1-20" marker on the author profile pages, to help navigate a long list of publications.  This is automatically updated as you expand the list of articles or page back and forth.

Finally, we made it easier to close obsolete accounts.  You can now delete your Scholar account, without closing the entire Google account.  This is useful if you have accidentally created multiple author profiles.  You can delete your Scholar account from the "Account" tab on the Scholar settings page.

Search results

The links are now a darker blue, and the visited links a darker purple, to help readability.  We also removed the underlines, for a cleaner and more consistent look.

The "Cite" dialog is now a bit crisper  - we tightened the text and removed redundant options to save to my library and change the export format setting. The "Save" option still appears next to the "Cite" option under every search result; and the export format can still be selected on the settings page.

On the court opinions side, you can now share and bookmark links to specific pages.  Click on the page number in the margins or in the text, and copy or bookmark the URL with "#p123" at the end.

Posted by: Alex Verstak, Senior Staff Engineer