Scholarcy

Scholarcy is an AI-powered reading and research tool that converts long, complex documents into interactive summary flashcards. Created by Phil Gooch while he was doing his PhD and launched in 2018, it is now used by more than 600,000 students and researchers, including people at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford, and it is part of the Texthelp group.

Each flashcard breaks a paper, book chapter, report, web article or YouTube video into key points, highlights, figures, tables, references and a research quality indicator. You can dig deeper by asking questions of the text, compare studies in a Literature Matrix, save everything to a personal library, and export up to 100 flashcards at a time to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, RIS or Zotero and note tools like Notion and Obsidian. It works in a web app and browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.

Scholarcy is best for students, academics and professionals who need to screen many papers quickly, build literature reviews, or understand dense material. It does not write literature reviews for you, but it helps you organize and synthesize the evidence yourself.

Scholarcy is freemium. The Free plan costs $0 and allows up to 10 summaries (one per day with the Article Summarizer), imports in multiple file formats with an 11MB file limit, and lets you export flashcards one at a time.

The paid Monthly plan is $9.99 per month with a 7-day free trial and can be cancelled anytime. The yearly plan, Scholarcy Plus, gives about a 25% discount (roughly $90 per year, or $7.50 per month). Paid plans include unlimited summaries, enhanced summaries, saved flashcards, notes and highlighting, collections, exports of up to 100 flashcards, Literature Matrix creation, bibliographies and a 50MB file limit.

Institutional and academic site licences are available on request, and subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly only.