Sidenote vs Scholarcy
Scholarcy condenses papers into flashcards and reference lists; Sidenote holds a cited conversation with the paper you are actually reading, one click from every source sentence.
Reads the page you already have open and cites every answer.
Breaks academic papers into flashcards and extracts their references.
Should you use Sidenote or Scholarcy?
Choose Sidenote if…
Choose Sidenote if you read across web pages, Google Docs, Notion, Confluence and SharePoint as well as PDFs, and you want every answer cited to the exact passage and checked against the source. It also chats conversationally and builds a jargon glossary.
Choose Scholarcy if…
Choose Scholarcy if your work is specifically academic papers and you want summary flashcards, automatic reference, figure and table extraction, and links out to the original open-access sources, plus a developer API to build on.
Both save you from wading through dense documents, both offer a free tier, and both take a source-traceable approach rather than opaque AI. The split is scope: Scholarcy is built around the research paper and its bibliography, while Sidenote reads whatever you have open and grounds every answer in a clickable citation.
Sidenote vs Scholarcy: feature by feature.
| Capability | Sidenote | Scholarcy |
|---|---|---|
| Reads the page or document you already have open | Yes | Partial |
| Works on web articles & live web pages | Yes | Partial |
| Works on private Confluence, Notion & SharePoint pages | Yes | No |
| Chat with a document | Yes | No |
| Citations scroll & highlight the exact passage | Yes | No |
| Server-side citation check drops unsupported claims | Yes | No |
| One-click glossary of jargon & acronyms | Yes | Partial |
| Ask across many documents at once | Yes | No |
| Reads scanned PDFs with built-in OCR | Yes | No |
| Flashcards & study extras | No | Yes |
| Large-scale literature & reference discovery | No | Yes |
| Developer API | No | Yes |
Last reviewed: 3 July 2026.
Compiled July 2026 from Scholarcy's official site and current public sources. Scholarcy summaries are extractive and traceable to the source text, but it does not chat conversationally, does not scroll a live page to a cited passage, and has no built-in OCR for scanned PDFs; its reference, figure and table extraction and its developer API are genuine strengths Sidenote does not match. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it. The cross-document row is powered by Sidenote Collections.
A summarizer you feed papers to, or a reader in the same tab as you.
Scholarcy is purpose-built for academic papers: hand it a PDF, DOCX or a journal URL, or point its extension at an open-access page, and it produces summary flashcards, pulls out the highlights, and extracts the references, figures and tables, linking references to open-access copies. Its summaries are extractive so you can trace claims back to the source text, and it exposes a developer API for teams that want to build on the extraction engine.
Sidenote sits in the browser side panel and works on whatever you are reading, whether that is a PDF, a web article, a Google Doc, or a private Notion, Confluence or SharePoint page, with no upload. Every answer is cited to the exact source passage; clicking a citation scrolls the live page to it and highlights it, and the server drops any quote it cannot ground in the document.
You are reading a dense methods paper in your browser. Scholarcy turns it into flashcards and a reference list you can export to Word, Excel, RIS or .bib. Sidenote lets you ask a follow-up question in the side panel and jumps you to the exact sentence in the paper that backs its answer, then defines the jargon in one click.
Where Scholarcy is the better tool.
Scholarcy has been refining academic-paper summarization for years, and it does several things Sidenote does not attempt. Credit where it is due.
Reference, figure & table extraction
Scholarcy pulls the citations, figures and tables out of a paper and links references to open-access copies on repositories like arXiv, which is genuinely useful for literature work.
Flashcards & study workflow
Its summary flashcards, literature matrices and one-click bibliographies, with export to Word, Excel, RIS and .bib, suit students and researchers building a review.
A real developer API
Scholarcy exposes public reference-extraction, knowledge-extraction and summarizer APIs, so teams can build the engine into their own tools, which Sidenote does not offer.
Sidenote vs Scholarcy: common questions
Read anything. With citations.
Sidenote reads from your side panel and cites every answer to the exact passage. Free to start, no card for the trial.
7-day Pro trial · No card required · Free plan forever