Scholarcy

Scholarcy Ltd, founded in 2018 by Phil Gooch, operates as a technology firm developing AI-powered tools aimed at making research more accessible. Gooch, with a background in information science, previously established CUBED, a text-analytics company that was later acquired by a larger publisher. His experience in scholarly publishing and natural language processing directly informed the creation of Scholarcy. The company targets a diverse client base including students, academics, researchers, and librarians who face the challenge of managing large volumes of scholarly literature.

The core of Scholarcy's offering is an online summarization tool that processes research papers, reports, and book chapters into digestible, interactive summary cards. This service leverages artificial intelligence to extract key information such as abstracts, highlights, a synopsis in plain English, and a comparative analysis that cross-references the document with other relevant papers. It identifies and extracts figures, tables, and data, making them available for download. The platform is designed to help users quickly grasp the main arguments of a text, follow its structure, and identify its principal findings, thereby accelerating the literature review process. Scholarcy's business model appears to be subscription-based, offering various plans for individuals and institutions, alongside a free browser extension for Chrome and Edge that provides basic functionality.

The service integrates with reference management software like Zotero and EndNote, allowing users to export summaries and bibliographic data directly. Another feature is the creation of a 'Robo-Highlighter' that automatically highlights important phrases and contributions within the text, mimicking how a human reader might mark up a document. This functionality addresses the need for efficient reading and comprehension in an environment of information overload. The platform also generates a referenced summary, linking claims back to their sources within the document and providing open-access links where available. Scholarcy aims to serve a global market of knowledge workers and institutions navigating the ever-expanding landscape of academic and professional research.

Keywords: research summarization, academic tool, AI text analysis, literature review, scholarly publishing, information extraction, reference management, speed-reading, knowledge management, natural language processing