Used Scholarcy for a year on conference papers and incident post-mortems. The flashcard feature is a solution in search of a problem.
The AI-generated summary distills a 20-page PDF into a structured abstract. That's value. It pulls out key claims, methods, and findings into a digestible format. But the "flashcards"? They're just fragmented, decontextualized sentences from the summary. Spaced repetition for academic papers is a misfire. You don't need to memorize a single line about a study's sample size. You need to understand the argument. The tool is trying to solve "learning" when the real problem is "time."
My workflow: run the PDF through, read the summary, extract the highlights to my notes, discard the rest. The flashcard UI adds clutter, not insight. It's a feature checkbox for marketing, not for engineers who need to parse information density under pressure.
Prove it.