Chrome and Firefox extensions for researchers: an honest list

Nine extensions worth installing for reading and saving research online, what each is for, and where Vite Research fits. No affiliate links, no ranking games.

Capture and highlight

Vite Research (Chrome, Firefox): highlight any web page with a comment and tags, save the page to a Library with a snapshot and citation, follow journal feeds. Free plan; Pro $8.99 a month for spaces, unlimited projects and sources, faster monitoring and evidence packs.
Zotero Connector: saves references and PDFs into Zotero from publisher pages; the standard companion of a reference manager.
Hypothesis: social annotation of web pages and PDFs with groups; widely used in teaching.

Read

Unpaywall (Chrome, Firefox): shows a green tab when a free, legal open-access copy of a paywalled article exists.
EndNote Click / Kopernio: one-click access to PDFs through your library subscriptions.
LibKey Nomad: links to full text through your library, if it subscribes to Third Iron.

Check and organise

scite: shows whether citing papers support or contrast a claim.
Google Scholar Button: quick Scholar lookup of the selected text.
Raindrop.io or Instapaper: plain read-it-later saving when you only need the link.

How to choose

Ask what you keep: a reference (Zotero), a passage with a note and the page it came from (Vite Research), a conversation about a text (Hypothesis), or just the link (Raindrop, Instapaper). Most researchers run a reference manager plus one highlighter; Vite Research imports from Zotero and Mendeley and exports BibTeX so the two work together.