Closed-source freeware. The repository is hosted on GitHub.

L’AcaRadar

L’AcaRadar is a lightweight, local-first academic tracking tool designed to monitor and visualize the citation metrics and publication updates of researchers via Google Scholar. It serves as a personal dashboard to keep a “radar” on scholars’ academic growth.

Core Features

• Scholar Monitoring: Track key metrics including total citations, h-index, i10-index, and total publication counts.

• Metric Comparison: Automatically calculates differences between the latest crawl and previous records, highlighting academic growth (e.g., +10 citations).

• Publication Highlights: Display each scholar’s highest-cited publication and their latest publication by year.

• Multi-Tag Management: Organize your monitored scholars using a flexible tagging system. Filter the list by specific groups or research interests.

• Anti-Block Mechanism: Features a customizable delay slider to manage request frequency, reducing the risk of being blocked by Google Scholar’s anti-crawling measures.

• Filtering & Sorting: Filter scholars by one or more labels, then sort the displayed list by citations, h-index, i10-index, publication count, or name in ascending or descending order.

• Search & Refresh Controls: Search by scholar name or Google Scholar ID, refresh a single profile, or update the full list in sequence.

• CSV Import, Backup & Ranking: Import scholars and labels in bulk, export a restorable CSV backup, or export the currently displayed ranking for reporting and analysis.

• Recycle Bin: Removed scholars are retained locally so they can be restored later, with permanent deletion available when needed.

• Privacy & Persistence: All data is stored locally in JSON format, and scholar avatars are cached on your machine to minimize network requests.

• Internationalization (i18n): Supports dynamic language switching between Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, US English, and UK English, with state persistence.

Install & Update

• Minimum Requirement: Microsoft Windows 10/11 X64 with minimum resolution 1366x768. Linux AMD64 version coming soon.

• Installation: Download the compiled Windows .exe release and put it in a dedicated writable folder. The main application source code is not distributed as part of the release.

• Update: Check the Releases page, download and replace the .exe file.

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Acknowledgement

This project is built using Flet in Python, with MiSans variable fonts.

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Important Disclaimer

Developer Statement I am an individual, non-professional developer. This tool was created primarily to satisfy my own academic tracking needs.

• Feature Requests: While suggestions are welcome, please understand that I cannot guarantee the implementation of any requested features. Priority is always given to my personal use requirements.

• Bug Reports: If you encounter a bug, please submit it via GitHub Issues using English.

• Connectivity Issues: I will not answer questions such as “Why can’t I connect to Google Scholar?” or “Why did the fetch fail?”. Google Scholar is highly sensitive to network environments. If you face these issues, please check your network settings, proxies, or VPN status first. Technical details are recorded in acaradar.log beside the application.

• Localization: The localization key-value files are published separately from the private application source. Contributions to the public locales/ files are highly appreciated and may be submitted via Pull Requests for manual review.

This project is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind.