Multiple highlighting using Chrome extensions

Anyone who does literature searching will know it can be a tedious job scanning through potentially hundreds of abstracts to pick out relevant results. When recently going through HDAS results, I thought it would be useful to be able to highlight multiple words at once (more than the one allowed by CTRL + F!) – it would make the whole process much quicker and effective! A short Google later and I found two Chrome extensions that do just that. Both are available for free from the Google Chrome Web Store (links through the titles). So, here are my thoughts on the two, and how I have found them useful:

Multi-highlight

Overview

The first extension I found, this is very simple to use. To do so, you simply click the icon in the top right of the toolbar, and type the words you wish to find into the box, separated by a space:

Once activated using the on/off switch, it will highlight those words on every page you visit unless you turn it off. However, just be careful because it starts recycling colours after 6 words!

Tips

1. You can use the colour recycling to your advantage, by distributing any synonyms to every 6 words.
2. The third word highlights in red, so I find it useful to put a word indicating irrelevance here.

Pros

• Really quick and intuitive to use!
• Saves the words until you manually delete them.
• Not case-sensitive.

Cons

• Doesn’t support phrase searching, truncation or wildcards.
• Recycles colours.
• Doesn’t search within words, so you need to specify each variation e.g. ascit wouldn’t bring back ascites or ascitic – you need to put both.
• Doesn’t work with pdfs.

Highlight This

(Or, to give it’s full name - Highlight This: finds and marks words in text)

Overview

I actually found this after increasing frustrations with Multi-highlight led me to look elsewhere. It’s not immediately obvious from its page on the Web Store, but this little extension has a lot of functionality and does address many of Multi-highlight’s flaws.

A little more complex to use, you assign words to lists which have a specified colour. However, this means that you can choose the colours you want to assign. To do so, you can either choose from their selection, or be more specific using a HTML colour code.  I use this site https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/html-color-codes.html to find and copy over the codes. Truncation and wildcards are also supported, as is phrase searching as new words are indicated by a line break, not a space.

Tips

1. You can highlight synonyms in the same colour, by assigning them to the same list. I’ve found it useful to have an “off-topic” list which highlights in red so I can see irrelevant results more easily.
2. You can add words to a list simply by highlighting with your mouse and right clicking:

Pros

• More choice of highlighting colours.
• Synonyms can be easily highlighted in the same colour.
• Truncation and wildcards are supported (although it also automatically searches within words – this can be turned off though!).
• Phrases can be highlighted.
• Individual lists can be paused, or the whole extension turned off.
• You don’t have to go into the app to add new words to lists.
• You can specify which sites it can highlight on.
• Saves the words until you manually delete them.
• Not case-sensitive.

Cons

• Bit trickier, less intuitive and more time consuming to set up (the help page is really useful though).
• Doesn’t work with pdfs.

All-in-all, I think it’s clear my favourite is Highlight This! However, if you’re after a quick and simple way to highlight only a couple of words, Multi-highlight may still be best for you. They have certainly both helped my results-scanning efficiency.

Have you tried either of these extensions, or maybe some similar ones? Let us know your favourites and any tips and tricks!