If you connect to Google Scholar through a proxy (for example, through your library’s proxy), you’ll find that GS is unable to remember your preference settings. Although Google seems to forget my preferences far too often, in the case of Google Scholar it isn’t their fault. When you connect through a proxy you appear to Google as a different user every time, and until preferences are tied to your Google account (and not a session/cookie), Google is simply unable to remember them.
To “solve” this problem, I’ve found that you can set a bookmark that will set your preferences each time it is clicked. While this doesn’t solve the problem of Google forgetting preferences between sessions, it will save you the time and effort of having to reset your preferences each time. You will need to custom-craft your bookmark. Here’s mine:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences
As you can see, in with I’m passing some options to “scholar_setprefs” – i.e. the mechanism that sets your Google Scholar preferences. I’m manipulating two options, Number of Results (num=50) and Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4). I could also directly manipulate the interface and search language, library links, and if the results opened new windows or not (I don’t because I’m happy with the GS defaults).
The options accept a range of values, which I’ll describe briefly:
Number of results (num), accepts:
If you’d like 100 results to be displayed, you’d change the url so that num=100.
Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4). Google Scholar supports a number of different export formats, and to change their default, you’ll need to change the scisf value. Here are the corresponding values:
- 4 (Bibtex)
- 3 (EndNote)
- 2 (RefMan)
- 1 (RefWorks)
- 5 (WenXianWang)
If you’re a RefWorks user, you’d change the string so that it looked like this scis=yes&scisf=1.
Putting it all together, if you’re a RefWorks user who wants 100 results displayed, you’d set your bookmark as follows:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=100&scis=yes&scisf=1&submit=Save+Preferences
Finally, if you’re accessing GS through your library proxy, you’ll need to add the proxy information into the URL. In the case of UNC we place the proxy information directly in the url. Therefore, my proxied bookmark looks like this:
http://scholar.google.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences
As you can see, I’ve added .libproxy.lib.unc.edu to the beginning of the URL. This will vary by library, so you’ll want to look at other proxied URL’s at your institution to get a feel for where the proxy information goes. As I noted above, there are a bunch of other options you can change directly. If you’d like to change those, simply view the source of the Google Scholar preferences page, look for the option and value pairs in the form, and tack them into the URL (making sure to add & before the option/value pair).
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
