The AI-powered
article summarizer

Scholarcy Summarizer

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

Not at this time - currently Scholarcy needs a publicly accessible URL to a paper, or needs you to upload the paper from your computer.
The Scholarcy Chrome extension has passed all of Google's automated and manual security checks and is safe to use. The extension only needs to read the current URL of the page you have open and its content type. You can also give it permission to upload PDF files from your computer. It does not read or change any data on the page. You will also see the same warning on practically all Chrome Extensions including chart-topping extensions such as Grammarly and Evernote. We are rolling out some changes to our Extension that will give you more control over the permissions. This may limit its functionality for you, but the Extension will request the permissions that it needs and you can grant or deny the request.
There are a number of ways that you can use Scholarcy to create a plain language summary for a research paper.
  1. Upload the paper to your Scholarcy Library (or try the Article Summarizer) where it will create a summary flashcard.
  2. Start with the text in the Scholarcy Highlights, Scholarcy Summary and Conclusion flashcard sections.
  3. If you need a different type of summary, try one of the Enhance options inside the Scholarcy Summary section.
  4. Follow links to definitions of technical terms for background context.
  5. Rework the text to suit your audience. If you are using Scholarcy Library, you can export the flashcard to Microsoft Word so you can edit it directly.
  6. Alternatively, you can try our new Smart Synopsis tool - click on the Advanced options and select Lay Reader mode from the dropdown on the left.
Scholarcy makes it easy to promote your research on Twitter. It generates a Tweetable headine from your research paper, with a link to the article and with key terms converted into hashtags. When you click the Tweet button, you can edit the Tweet before you send it. In some cases it may need a little cutting down to size. We also recommend using the Chirr App extension to turn the summary of your article into a Twitter thread. This video shows you how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e51fM98Es4U

Image/figure extraction is disabled by default both in the Chrome Extension and Scholarcy Library web app. You can enable it in the Chrome Extension by choosing Options, and in the Library by choosing Settings, select the Import tab, and then sliding the Extract figures slider to the right.

Our Chrome Extension and Web Library provide a number of options, for example, the summary length or whether to extract images.
You can export up to 100 flashcards to Excel, Word, Markdown, Powerpoint or RIS (Endnote, Zotero) at a time. To do this, go to the Settings menu and click View, and then change the Rows on page to 100. Then click the   Save changes button. Then go to your folder or Library, click the Move/Export/Delete button, and click Export documents Export documents Click the checkbox at the top to select all articles, and then click the Export selected button.
To extract the references, Scholarcy usually needs access to the full text of the article or chapter, unless the publisher has made the references openly available with the abstract. Otherwise, the article/chapter needs to be open access, or you need to upload the PDF directly, if you have legitimate access to it. Reference extraction is available within the Chrome Extension, if you are logged into your Scholarcy account, or within Scholarcy Library. Within the summary flashcard for the article, click the Download button in the References tab to download them as either a RIS or BibTeX. In Scholarcy Library, you can also export the references in bulk from a collection of articles.    
To identify duplicate items in your Library, follow these steps:
  1. Navigate to the library or folder that you want to deduplicate.
  2. Slide the Show duplicates slider to the right. This may process for a few seconds.
  3. Sort items by Title by clicking on the up or down arrow next to the Title column heading.
  4. You will see duplicate items grouped by title.
You can then use the Move/Export/Delete button in the top menu to move duplicate items to another folder, or delete them.
Here's the quickest way to connect your Zotero library to Scholarcy:  
  1. Go to your Profile page in Scholarcy Library, and under Zotero configuration click Connect your Zotero Account
  2. You will be prompted to log into your Zotero account, if you are not already logged into Zotero
  3. Once logged into Zotero, click the Accept Defaults button (alternatively you can click Change Permissions to configure which Zotero libraries and groups Scholarcy can access)
  4. You can now import your Zotero records and PDFs via the From the Web or cloud storage section of the Import panel.
  5. If you wish to disconnect Zotero from your Scholarcy account, you can do this on the Profile page