Nothing about your browsing ever leaves your browser.
SciPeek adds SJR and quartile data to journal listings on Scopus, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and a set of publisher sites. This page explains, plainly, what that requires — and what it doesn't.
What SciPeek does
SciPeek is a Manifest V3 Chrome extension. When you visit a search-results, profile, article, or journal page on Scopus, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, or one of the supported publisher sites (Springer, Nature, ACS, RSC, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, MDPI, IOP, IEEE Xplore, SAGE, Oxford Academic, Frontiers, Science, AIP, APS, Cambridge, De Gruyter, PLOS, and Cell Press), it reads the journal titles and identifiers already visible on that page and looks them up against a Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) snapshot bundled inside the extension itself — an offline SQLite database, queried in-browser via WebAssembly (sql.js). It then renders a small badge or a small edge tab (Quartile, SJR, H-index, and a link to scimagojr.com) next to each matched journal.
That lookup — matching a journal title or ISSN already on your screen against a local table — is the entire extent of what the extension does with page content. Nothing about it requires, or performs, a network call.
What data we collect
Concretely, the extension does not collect or transmit: browsing history, search queries, page content, personal identifiers, authentication credentials, location, or any other category defined in the Chrome Web Store's data-usage disclosure. It sets no cookies and uses no third-party tracking of any kind.
The one thing it remembers is a display preference: the vertical position of the floating edge tab and whether it is collapsed or expanded. This is saved in your browser's local storage for the site you are visiting. It contains no information about you or what you read, and it never leaves your browser. Because it lives in that site's own local storage, the site can in principle read it, and it is removed by clearing that site's data, not by uninstalling.
What happens on the page, technically
Content scripts read journal titles/ISSNs already rendered in the page's own DOM (the same text your browser already downloaded to show you the page) and pass them, in-memory, to an offscreen document running the bundled WASM database. The match result comes back the same way. None of this crosses a network boundary — it's function calls within your browser, not requests to any server, ours or anyone else's.
| Permission | Why SciPeek asks for it |
|---|---|
| offscreen | Lets sql.js keep the local WASM database alive; MV3 service workers can be suspended mid-query, so the offscreen document holds it instead. |
| activeTab | Lets the popup show whether SciPeek is active on the current tab's site. Only used when you open the popup yourself; nothing is read in the background. |
| site access | The content scripts run only on the supported sites listed above, to read the journal name or ISSN on the page and insert the badge or tab. No page content leaves the browser. |
The outbound links
Each badge includes a link to that journal's page on scimagojr.com. Clicking it
opens Scimago's own site in a new tab — a normal, user-initiated browser navigation, exactly
like clicking any other link on a webpage. SciPeek does not pre-fetch, ping, or otherwise
contact scimagojr.com on your behalf; the request only happens if and when you click, and it
goes directly from your browser to Scimago, subject to their own privacy practices, not ours.
The expanded floating badge also carries a small "Powered by ARTi" credit that links to
arti.ai.id. It works the same way: nothing is loaded from that site, and it
is contacted only if you click the link. The logo image is bundled inside the extension. The
toolbar popup additionally links to this project's source code on GitHub, again opened only
when you click it.
Data retention & your control
Since nothing is collected, there is nothing retained, sold, or shared with third parties — including for the purposes of creditworthiness, lending, or advertising. Uninstalling the extension removes the bundled database and all extension state from your machine. The only leftover is the tab-position preference described above, kept in each visited site's local storage until you clear that site's data.
Changes to this policy
If SciPeek's data practices ever change, this policy will be updated and the "Effective" date above revised accordingly, before the change ships in a new version.