FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

You may need to experiment with both the v1 and v2 options for the Image engine setting (under Engine settings) to get the best results. Generally, the default v1 option works best for figures made up of a single bitmap, whereas v2 works well when each figure is made of multiple bitmaps or a mixture of bitmap and line drawings.

Normally, you should see a ‘Save to Library’ button in the Chrome extension when you are logged into your Scholarcy Library account. If not, you may need to log out from Scholarcy Library, clear your cookies, and log in again.

Log out from your Scholarcy Library. Go to chrome://settings/siteData?search=cookies and search for scholarcy.com. Delete cookies from library.scholarcy.com and scholarcy.com and then log in to your Scholarcy Library account again.

You may also need to temporarily disable any Adblocker extensions you have running while you carry out this process.

You can! We have a suite of cloud-based or on-premises APIs, and are happy to work with other companies who would like to use our technology in their products and services. For example, Scholarcy is probably the only tool out there that can

  • extract references accurately from any PDF or Word document, in any referencing style, link them to Google Scholar, and convert them to XML, so you can easily reformat them into your own house style.
  • extract metadata from manuscripts to pre-populate author submission and peer review systems
  • extract key findings and highlights to improve discoverability and SEO
  • generate lay summaries for a non-expert audience
  • extract key terms, glossaries, facts, statistics and claims from documents of almost any size (hundreds of pages or more)

All data is transmitted via SSL and TLS in both directions. When you use the Scholarcy Library, Scholarcy Chrome Extension, Scholarcy API, or any of our demos, we process the following data:

  • your IP address. This data is logged and retained for 1 year.
  • The current URL in your browser. This data is logged and retained for 1 year.
  • The contents of the current page in your browser, or the contents of the file that you upload. This data is deleted immediately after processing – usually within 30 seconds.
  • If you are logged in to the Scholarcy Web Library, an authentication cookie that allows the Chrome Extension to store the summary content in your Web Library account.

When you sign up to the Scholarcy Library web app, we securely store your name, email address, and affiliation if you choose to provide it. This data is stored as part of your account, and you have control over its retention and deletion.

If you sign up to our mailing list (via separate opt-in), we use secure, third-party services to process your email address. Any other processing of your data is initiated by you, such as requesting a password reset.

We do not store credit card or other sensitive information. Our payment services are handled by Stripe. See our general Terms of Service, our Scholarcy Library Terms of Service, and our Privacy Policy for more information. You can also delete your account at any time and this will completely remove your information from our systems, apart from data required for legal compliance purposes.

We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of the Scholarcy Website, Scholarcy Library, and the Scholarcy Extension. For more details, see our Cookies Policy and our Privacy Policy.

If you subscribe to Scholarcy Library – our paid, premium subscription service –  you will be able to create searchable libraries of summary cards that you can access, share and annotate on any device, and import and export to a range of formats and other software, including your favourite reference manager. You will also have access to future premium features such as:

  • smart synopsis integration
  • literature matrix creation

and much more, for a reasonable monthly cost – see the Pricing page.

Most of the time taken is loading the PDF or Word document from the server where it resides, or uploading the document from your computer. If you are using the Scholarcy Web Library, and are uploading a large document with a slow internet connection, it may take a minute or two before the summary card appears in your library.

Once it has the PDF, Scholarcy takes around 5-20 seconds to turn the PDF into data. However, some PDFs that live on a slow server, or contain many images, may take more time to process. If you don’t require figure extraction:

  • If using the Chrome Extension, right-click on the Scholarcy icon in the Chrome toolbar (or via chrome://extensions/, choose Options, and uncheck ‘Extract figures’.
  • If using the Library app, choose Settings and uncheck ‘Extract figures’

It’s also possible that the user interface hasn’t automatically refreshed, so you can reload the page and the summary card should then appear in your library.

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.

Not at this time – currently Scholarcy needs a publicly accessible URL to a paper, or needs you to upload the paper from your computer.

Scholarcy streams the document into memory, and then permanently deletes it immediately after processing – usually within 30 seconds. It returns the extracted reading list, summaries, and references back to you. Use of these snippets in good faith for the purposes of dissemination of knowledge is covered by US Fair Use and recent UK Copyright Exemptions for Text and data mining for non-commercial research.