Using the Scholarcy Browser Extension

Our browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox processes the contents of the current page in your web browser, if it is publicly accessible and not behind a login/paywall. The contents of the current page will be processed on our server, and the extracted information is returned to you. All content is deleted from our server within 30 minutes. When you click on the Scholarcy extension and choose ‘Options’, you can modify the way Scholarcy processes your content.

We use Google Analytics to gather anonymised statistics on the features that are being used (or not being used), to help us prioritise improvements to the service. None of this data is shared and we do not use this data for marketing or advertising purposes. Please read our Privacy and Cookies Policies, and also our FAQ for more information on how your data is processed.

We’ve recently simplified the options to make the extension easier to configure. By default, all options apart from Rewrite in 3rd person, Extract tables, Extract figures are enabled.

Summarisation settings

This sets the length of the Scholarcy summary section of the flashcard. You can choose to have a summary with a fixed word limit set by the words option, or as a fraction of the original document set by the % option. If set, the % will override any value for the  fixed word count. However, when the Structured summary and Section snippets options are checked (default – see below), setting a target summary length will have less of an effect, depending on the structure and length of the original article.

Summary engine

This can be set to articles, which gives a good result for a broad range of documents, or books/chapters, which tends to work better for book chapters and longer texts.

Rewrite in 3rd person

This rewrites the Scholarcy summary section into a neutral third person (for example ‘The authors’ results suggest …’) to make it easier to quote from and reference sections of the paper.

Structured summary

When checked, the AI will aim to structure the summary according to the structured of the source document, for example Introduction, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusion.

Section snippets

When checked, snippets from each section will be shown in the flashcard, and the AI will sample from these snippets when Structured summary is also enabled. When unchecked, the full content of each section will be shown and used as the input to the summary engine.

Highlighting

Auto highlighting

Facts (blue) and claims (beige) within the article are automatically highlighted for you, but you can uncheck this here to turn this feature off.

Wikipedia links

We automatically link key terms throughout the text to their Wikipedia articles, but if this is getting in the way, you can switch this off here.

Figures and tables

Extract tables

This identifies tabular data and their captions, showing the captions in a Tables section along with a download button to save the tables to an Excel file on your computer.

Extract figures

This extracts figures and their captions into a Figures section. You can then click on each figure to show a larger version in a new browser tab. Each Figure will be linked to callouts in the text. Figure extraction is very CPU intensive and, for large documents with high-resolution images, may not always be successful, so it is disabled by default.