Alright, let's cut to the chase. I’ve been on my quarterly tool-testing cycle and decided to give Scholarcy a proper run for academic research, specifically with JSTOR content. The promise of summarizing dense papers and extracting key bits sounded perfect for building prospect backgrounds.
My experience? A frustrating series of dead ends.
The core issue seems to be JSTOR's paywall and format rigidity. Scholarcy works great when you feed it a clean PDF you already own. But the "browser extension" or "library" integration they vaguely mention? Practically useless for a legitimate JSTOR academic article you're accessing through a library portal.
Here’s what I tried and what happened:
* **Direct PDF download from JSTOR:** If your institution allows it, this *sometimes* works. But the downloaded PDF often includes JSTOR's header/footer metadata, which Scholarcy seems to parse as part of the text, throwing off the summary.
* **Using the browser extension on the JSTOR article page:** It either fails to recognize the article content behind the login or captures a jumbled mess of site navigation.
* **The "URL import" in the dashboard:** Same result. It hits the login wall and gets nothing.
It feels like Scholarcy is built for the ideal, open-access world, not the gated reality most of us research in. I’ve had smoother integrations with CRM APIs.
So, I'm skeptical of any workflow claims involving locked-down repositories. Has anyone actually built a reliable pipeline for this, or is the JSTOR use case just a marketing bullet point they hope no one tests?