My background is in publishing, healthcare, and more recently NLP and ML. I've been building and contributing to open source tools for years, and now decided to build a product based on what I've learnt and that solved a problem I had.
Scholarcy came about as a result of a need when I was doing my PhD - to have a tool that would give me an easy-to-read overview of every PDF on my computer, to help me prioritise which to read first, because I couldn't face reading them all!
I also wanted something that would tell me which concepts I needed to understand first in order to get the most out of a paper, and I needed an easy way to get hold of all the cited papers. And finally, I wanted something that would give me snippets of the important points to kick start the note-taking process.
While there are plenty of tools that will trawl over a collection of papers and give you aggregate information about their topics for the purposes of recommendation, there was nothing that would read the paper in front of me, right here right now, and tell me the gist of what it was about. So at the start of 2018 I set about developing something that met this need.
