Announcing: EA Mastermind • Tool Review: Sourcely for finding sources


Dear Scholar,

Finding credible papers for an unfinished manuscript can make the difference between a good and an excellent paper, and it shouldn’t take longer than writing the paper. In this week's blog post, I tested Sourcely, an AI research assistant that matches academic sources directly to your text.

Just paste in your draft, and it suggests peer-reviewed papers, highlights citation-worthy text, and summarizes them. You can export these citations, download the PDFs, and save everything in one place.

In this article, we uploaded a 1,000-word test with no references, and within 30 seconds, Sourcely pulled relevant, high-citation papers and matched them to specific lines in the draft. It wasn’t perfect in some aspects, but incredibly surprising in others! Check out the deep-dive for more information:

The Effortless Academic Mastermind

I am launching something I’ve never offered before: The Effortless Academic Mastermind — a small group, focused multi-week class where you can learn everything about digital note-taking, AI, literature reviews, productivity and tools for academics.

More importantly, this premium, small-cohort course will be tailored to the actual challenges of the group, not just abstract examples in a lecture. We will discuss solutions, share our screens, hold each other accountable for implementing the newly learned techniques, and create research habits that can change careers.

✅ Series of meetings and lectures over 6-8 weeks

✅ Screen-sharing & hot seat discussions

✅ Access to all my previous courses/webinars and materials

✅ Exclusive, engaged and supportive community and bonus materials

✅ Covers every aspect of the academic journey: notes, synthesis, research gaps, writing, lit reviews, etc.

This isn’t a course. It’s a transformation.

I recorded a video to explain the idea in a little bit more detail:

video preview

If you are interested in joining, please click on the button below and fill out the survey. I will select people with similar backgrounds and time zones from the questionnaire and offer them a ticket shortly.

Filling out the survey does not oblige you to join.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic

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The Effortless Academic

Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

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