There is no account, no login, no analytics package, no telemetry and no user tracking of any kind. Nothing about you or your searches is sent anywhere by the extension.
Nothing. The extension has no server of its own, no analytics library and no event reporting. It does not build a profile, does not record your searches, and does not transmit anything about you or your browsing.
Article data the extension gathers — PMIDs, citation counts, scores, journal figures — is kept in Chrome's local extension storage on your own computer so the bar can render without re-fetching. It never leaves the machine. You can inspect all of it with the Data button in the popup, which exports every field the extension holds, including its internal ones, and clear it with Reset Extension.
To display metrics, the extension requests public data about the articles on the page you are viewing. Those requests contain article identifiers — PMIDs and DOIs — and nothing about you. As with any web request, the services below will see that a request arrived and from what IP address, under their own privacy policies.
| Service | What is requested |
|---|---|
| NIH iCite | Citation counts and RCR, by PMID |
| Europe PMC | Citation counts, by PMID, when iCite is unavailable |
| NCBI E-utilities | Article metadata, by PMID |
| Semantic Scholar | Influential citation counts |
| Altmetric | Attention scores, by DOI |
| Crossref | Full-text links and DOI registration details |
| OpenAlex | Author metrics, by ORCID |
| ClinicalTrials.gov | Trial results, only when you use Expand |
SCImago journal rankings and the curated top-journal list ship inside the extension as local files, so those cost no network request at all.
Chrome asks you to approve a list of permissions at install. Here is what each one is actually for.
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| activeTab, scripting | To draw the citation bar onto the PubMed page you are looking at |
| storage | To keep article data and your settings locally between pages |
| tabs | To detect which kind of PubMed page you are on, and to open reports in new tabs |
| bookmarks, management, system.memory, browsingData | To display the diagnostic panel at the bottom of the popup — Chrome version, operating system, memory, and counts of bookmarks and installed extensions — which exists so you can paste useful details into a support request. These are read locally and shown to you only. They are never transmitted. |
Host permissions are limited to PubMed, NCBI and the public metadata services listed above. The extension does not run on any other site.
These pages are static files served by GitHub Pages. There are no cookies, no analytics and no third-party trackers. Web fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which will see your IP address as it would on any site using them. GitHub keeps its own server logs, as any web host does.