PDF tools for researchers and academics
Convert papers to Word for citation, OCR scanned older sources, translate foreign-language papers, combine literature for review.
Researchers across humanities, social sciences, and STEM share a common workflow: read PDFs, extract quotations, build literature reviews, prepare manuscripts. The tools provided by university libraries are often slow, locked behind paywalls, or simply absent for older non-digital archives.
PDFOnly's research workflow tools: OCR scanned older books and papers from library archives (100+ languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, German for non-English-language sources); convert PDFs to Word for clean citation extraction without retyping; translate foreign-language papers into your working language; combine multi-source PDFs into a single literature-review companion document; extract data tables from empirical papers straight to Excel for re-analysis. Free for the basics; Pro adds AI summarization for fast brief-reading and citation-aware Q&A.
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Frequently asked questions
Will citations format correctly in the OCR'd output?
Yes — citation patterns (Author, Year), footnote numbers, and bibliography lists are preserved as text. Some non-Latin scripts (CJK, Arabic) may have mixed-direction issues with embedded English citations; spot-check footnotes if accuracy is critical.
Can AI summarize a long paper for me?
Yes — AI Summarize PDF (Pro plan) produces an executive summary, key findings, and methodology highlights with page citations. Useful for triaging which papers are worth reading in full during literature review. Citations let you verify any claim by jumping to the source page.
Are my unpublished drafts safe?
Files are encrypted, processed in isolated workers, and auto-deleted in an hour. We never train AI models on customer documents. Pro plans extend retention to 7 days for re-downloads; Enterprise adds custom retention with audit logs.