Using the Scholarcy Web Library

You can add PDF, Word, HTML, XML and Powerpoint files to your web library, and our AI engine will convert them into summary flashcards that you can store, export, share and annotate on any device.

Documents can be imported into your Scholarcy Library in a number of ways. Within one of your chosen library folders:

  • Click the green Upload + button on the main screen and then drag and drop one or more files and folders onto the Drop your documents here panel, or click the Browse button and navigate directly to a file.
  • Copy and paste a DOI or publicly accessible URL in to the Open access URL or DOI field and click Import
  • Click on the Dropbox or Google Drive icons to the left of the Upload button, allow Scholarcy to access your files and folders, and then select the files or folders that you wish to import and click Add to library.
  • Via the Scholarcy Chrome Extension: click on the Save to Library button at the bottom of the summary card created by the Extension. You may need to temporarily disable any adblocker extensions to enable this integration.

We provide a range of options to help you customise the way Scholarcy processes your documents. To explore these, select Settings from the left-hand menu of the main screen and enable or disable the various options as described below.

By default, all options apart from Extract figures are enabled.

Basic options

Generate summary

This creates the Scholarcy summary section, comprising a summary of the main document text, 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 Extract 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.

Structured summary

This attempts to structure the summary as Introduction, Objective, Methods, Results, Conclusion. This works well for STEM articles. For other document types, this may only create an  Introduction and Conclusion, so you may wish to uncheck this option for non-STEM articles.

Extract sections

This identifies the main sections in the document (Introduction, Methods, Conclusion etc) and either creates summary sections for each of these when Extract snippets is checked (default), or outputs the full section text when Extract snippets is unchecked.

Extract statistics

This identifies population, intervention and outcome measures and reports these in a Participants and statistics section.

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.

Highlight facts

This highlights in yellow important facts stated by the paper. This is computationally intensive, so for long documents it may be best to disable this option.

Smart highlighting

Individual facts may span a few words and may lack context, so Smart highlighting extends the fact to a complete clause.

Highlight contributions

This highlights (in purple) the main goals that the authors set out to achieve and the main contributions of the paper.

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.

Link citations

This creates links between inline citations such as [3, 4] or (Smith 2007a) to the relevant bibliographic entry.

Advanced options

You probably won’t want to or need to change these options very often, but you may like to experiment with them to speed up processing or improve the results.

External metadata

This locates metadata from external sources such as CrossRef, arXiv and others to correct the results of the automated extraction of title, authors and abstract where necessary.

Require captions

If checked, only extract images and tables that have associated captions.

PDF engine

Reflowing text in the correct order from PDF files is surprisingly difficult. The default, stable setting is generally best for most PDFs. Changing this to experimental may give improved results on ‘difficult’ PDFs.

Key points

Determines how many key points are displayed in the Scholarcy highlights section – 5 (default) is a good starting point for most articles.

Summary engine

The default engine, stable, gives a good result for articles and shorter documents. Try the experimental engine for longer, more narrative texts such as book chapters.

Image engine

If Extract figures is enabled, v1 works well for extracting figures consisting only of bitmap images. v2 works better if the figures contain a mix of bitmap and line images.

Background reading list

  • Fast: maps key terms to a Wikipedia search query but does not attempt to verify or disambiguate the results
  • Precise (default): maps key terms to the correct Wikipedia entry, which may add a few seconds to processing time
  • Broad: A combination of the Fast and Precise, and includes Wikipedia entries that include the key term in the title
  • Broader: As for broad, but also includes Wikipedia entries that include the key term in the entry.

Key terms

  • Narrow (default): Identifies specific key terms in the document
  • Broad: As for narrow but also includes acronyms
  • Broader: As for broad but also includes frequent noun phrases

Sampling

  • Representative (default): Harvests key terms from a representative sample of the document
  • Full text: Harvests key terms from the full document

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