earlbellinger / scholarquest

Unlock achievements with your academic success and view them on Google Scholar!

ScholarQuest

Academia gamified! Gain experience, unlock achievements, and level up when you contribute to humanity's quest for knowledge by publishing scholarly articles.

It's a chrome extension that tracks the data on your Google Scholar profile page and gives achievements when you reach certain milestones.

Play here!
_{URL: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scholarquest/mgkokkhkifdllajadfkmbjkchhcignml}

Screenshot:

scholarquest's Issues

Zooming in the browser breaks badge images

When the user zooms in (Ctrl++), the badges become blurry. This could perhaps be fixed by listening to zoom events and reloading when they happen.

When a zoomed page is reloaded, the badges leave their bounding boxes. I am not yet sure how to fix this.

Improve achievement names and descriptions

The achievement names and descriptions are a little boring.

Field-specific badges or levels

Some badges may not be appropriate for some scientific fields.

For example, economic papers list authors by name instead of by the level of contribution, and so the First Author badge is not relevant.

The amount of citations (etc) needed for each level could perhaps be scaled based on field as well.

The research field of the user could be harnessed from the "Areas of interest" on the scholar page.

Other countries/languages?

Needs testing when a person doesn't have a scholar.google.com account but rather something like scholar.google.dk or any other country.

Gain experience based on each citation/paper/etc

Currently, experience for your Scholar Level comes from completing full achievements. This could perhaps be improved by gaining experience for each citation, etc. For example, a citation could be worth 1 point, a paper worth 100 points, a first-author paper worth double, etc. Reasonable levels would need to be set based off of that, perhaps according to hard data (i.e. by looking at a number of scholar profiles and figuring out experience thresholds based on those).

Achievement dates reset upon the release of new versions

All of the badges currently read "2021-03-31" as that was the latest version. Somehow new patches should not overwrite existing achievements.

A button to tweet achievements?

I go back and forth over whether this is would be a good idea.

Pros:

• it may provide further encouragement to write papers, etc.
• it would help people find out about ScholarQuest

Cons:

• the game is meant to be personal and non-competitive
• it may be difficult to design such a tweet in a way that is not annoying