Scholarcy is an online tool that quickly creates automatic summaries of research articles, reports, book chapters, etc. It uses artificial intelligence to identify key information in a research paper such as study participants, data analyses, main findings, limitations, etc. Thus, it can potentially be useful for entrepreneurship scholars and students to save time during the literature review phase of their academic research.
Scholarcy creates an interactive, summary flashcard for each article. These flashcards can then be used to quickly screen a bunch of papers, review a few, or communicate a summary with peers and collaborators. For example, consider this highly cited entrepreneurship research paper co-authored by Dean A. Shepherd:
Wiklund, J. and Shepherd, D. (2005) Entrepreneurial Orientation and Small Business Performance: A Configurational Approach. Journal of Business Venturing, 20, 71-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2004.01.001
Once you provide an open-access URL or a PDF of the paper to Scholarcy, below is the flashcard that it automatically creates:
The online tool also creates section-wise summaries ranging from discussion and related work to tables and references. One of the sections is ‘Scholarcy Highlights’, as seen below:
Note that the text is automatically generated by an algorithm, not a human, and hence can be a bit ‘unfriendly’ for the reader. Nevertheless, this productivity tool can be part of the entrepreneurship PhD student’s arsenal during the doctoral journey.