Assimilate Literature with Scholarcy
How to screen and assimilate scholarly literature in a more systematic way is an online tutorial that we held in April 2022. Here we share the webinar video with you. We have also added the questions that were asked during the live session and their responses. If you have a question, please send it through using the form below, and we will follow up with a response and any other resources.
This session showed how you can extract and assimilate key information in a more systematic way and critically analyse the text by easily identifying:
how the author positions their work in relation to previous studies;
what the key findings of any cited studies are;
other indicators of the quality of the research.
About the Speakers
Emma Warren-Jones - Co-Founder
Emma has 20 years’ experience in the EdTech, academic publishing, and information industries, launching content & discovery platforms and analytics tools to the global research community.
Scholarcy
Scholarcy is a service that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to read and condense academic papers into referenced summaries. Either upload your PDFs to Scholarcy, or give Scholarcy the public URL of a PDF and it will read the paper, break it down into readable chunks, and summarise it automatically. It will also read the bibliography and generate a link for each reference so that you can download cited papers.
Additional Resources
Individual and Institutional Subscriptions
For 30% off an individual subscription, please click here
If you would like to enquire about institutional subscription, please email: info@scholarcy.com, or complete the contact form here
Q&A
+ Can institutions buy licences, or is it just individuals?
Scholarcy offers both institutional and individual licenses. For institutional licences, please email info@scholarcy.com and for individual purchase, please click here for 30% off.
+ How much will an individual Scholarcy subscription cost after the first year?
£72
+ Are there videos aimed at institutions considering buying a licence?
Not as such, but we can set-up demos for interested institutions as well as one-month trials. We also have promotional documentation and flyers that we’d be happy to share with interested stakeholders. Feel free to get in touch at info@scholarcy.com if you’d like more information on this.
+ Is the Scholarcy app available in Apple app?
Scholarcy is a web application and so is compatible with any web browser, including the web browser on your iPhone or iPad, but there is no specific app as such.
+ If scholars use Scholarcy to produce the literature review for their PhD thesis, do they need to declare this?
No. Scholarcy does not produce the literature review for you, it helps you to organise and analyse the sources. It is a productivity tool. It is still up to you to write the literature review itself.
+ Are there other tools beyond Scholarcy and reference managers to assist in the analysis of literature?
There are other tools available, depending on the type of literature review, such as Rayyan and Pico portal.
+ Is this system compatible with Mendeley reference manager?
Yes, you can export to BibTeX or RIS file format and those file formats will go straight into Mendeley. The reverse is also possible – so you can export from Mendeley in RIS or BibTeX file format and import that into Scholarcy. If you’d like to import the PDFs that are currently in your Mendeley library, you’d have to locate those on your computer and drag them into Scholarcy or import them via Google Drive. We are looking at a direct integration with Mendeley in the future so that this could be a bit more automated.
+ Does the application import literature from the web?
Scholarcy can import open-access literature from the web, via RSS feeds, search engine exports, or directly via URL, as we demonstrated.
+ Is the indexing multi-dimensional? Could I classify a paper as being about a person, a topic, a method, a country, a language, an institution, etc.? Does it have Tags like Mendeley, for example?
Scholarcy primarily focuses on content extraction to identify the key information from each study. You can organise papers into folders and libraries. You can add key terms to each study, but we don’t currently have a tagging system to organise papers by tags, but it is something we could add in future.
+ Is Scholarcy compatible with Endnote?
Scholarcy will work with any reference manager that can import RIS or BibTeX files. This includes Endnote, Mendeley, Zotero, and many others.
+ Can we import existing collections of articles from Endnote to Scholarcy?
Yes. You would need to export as a RIS file and then import that RIS file directly into Scholarcy.
+ Will these RIS documents generated contain my previous notes added (when convert from Endnote to Scholarcy)?
RIS does have a field for storing notes, so if Endnote stores them, then yes they will be carried over.
+ Can I import an Endnote Library and its files?
You’d need to export them as a RIS file and then import them into Scholarcy.
+ What is the relationship between Endnote and Scholarcy? Do you think that Scholarcy can kind of replace the citation organiser like Endnote? Or need to work together?
Endnote is a reference manager, it’s good at creating bibliographies. They work together, complementing each other. Scholarcy is for extracting the key facts and findings, and then to create the bibliography, you’d export to Endnote or another reference manager.
+ Pdf documents will need to be added manually when importing from Endnote. Does this mean you need to attach them one-by-one?
No, you can drag and drop a whole folder of pdfs. You can also upload multiple pdfs at one time. It can upload up to 128 at once, or you can import them from your Google Drive or DropBox.
+ How can one be sure that you have the most up to date research at your fingertips?
Subscribing to publisher RSS feeds can help.
+ Please explain: a) Optimizing scholarly journal searches when searching within a set basket of journals, b) Doing ""forward citation"" searches and downloading the results (to CSV formatted file?) to track reading progress in a spreadsheet (unless there is a better way!) and c) Setting up alerts for articles to be notified when they are cited?
We cover the reading and analysis part in this webinar, so post-search and post-discovery. However, there are many resources available online on literature searching and discovery. For b) you could use ConnectedPapers, ResearchRabbit. For c) you could use Scite.ai, Dimensions, Web of Science.
+ What is best practice for paraphrasing ideas?
By reading many articles you can get an idea of how other authors paraphrase when citing. There are also tools from Writefull that can help with writing academic English.
+ Can we place the highlights ourselves, in case we find additional points that we find useful?
Yes, we integrate with Hypothes.is so you can add your own highlights and annotations and store these.
+ What if the article is not open access, or we do not have a subscription?
If the article is not open access or you do not have a subscription then the link will direct to the publisher’s page for that article (usually the abstract).
+ How do I link this to my commercial databases? Do I need to retrieve articles first?
You’d need to export the data into a file format compatible with Scholarcy and then import it to Scholarcy. For Scholarcy to locate them, they’d need to be Open Access. If they are not, you’d need to upload the pdfs to Scholarcy manually.
+ Can you integrate pdfs of book chapters to generate the flash cards?
Yes, you can import book chapters. There’s a different summarisation engine that you can switch on for book chapters.
+ How does one create the filtering tables in the exported Excel spreadsheet, as shown?
Creating Excel slicers is covered in these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y40Wy1guAiQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_bHx5hGMq8
+ Would Excel work with the manual highlights and annotations as well?
You can add manual highlights and annotations. We use a system called Hypothes.is, which is the industry standard annotation system for the web. The manual annotations are stored outside of Scholarcy, so they don’t form part of the Excel export. However, the top 5 highlights and the summary flashcards can be edited, so you can add your own notes in there, which will get exported to Excel. Here’s a link to a video that shows how.
+ What does an export to Word look like?
You can export (multiple) flashcards to Word. It’ll export as a structured summary of the paper, with its highlights, with references at the end. You can also tailor the settings before you export to Word, so you can customise what you export. So, you could have just the highlights, and not the full structured summary, for example. Unfortunately, Word won’t give you the same side-by-side view that Excel can.
+ Are there more tutorials available on how to use Scholarcy?
Yes, please click through to our YouTube channel for more.
