Search all your research papers at once, with the page to cite

For a literature review or a thesis: how to find which of your downloaded papers mentions a method, a dataset or a result, and quote it with its page, across a whole folder of PDFs.

By the second year of a degree, most people have a folder of a few hundred PDFs: papers, book chapters, theses, lecture notes. Somewhere in there is the paper that compared the two methods, the one that used that dataset, the sentence you want to quote. Reference managers search titles, authors and abstracts well. The sentence on page 14 is harder.

🎯 What you usually need to find

🧪 which papers use a particular method or dataset
📖 the exact wording of a definition, to quote
📈 a result: "accuracy dropped to", "no significant difference"
🗣️ where an author criticises another approach
📄 the page number, for the citation

🔎 Searching the full text of every paper

Drop the folder into AskFolder and ask the way you'd ask a supervisor:

Ask	Finds
"which papers use the UK Biobank data"	every paper that mentions using it, with the page
"definition of construct validity"	the definitions, to compare and quote
"limitations of self-reported measures"	"participants may under-report", even without the word "limitation"
"comparison of random forest and logistic regression"	the results sections that compare them

The answers are passages from the papers themselves, with the file name and page, best match first. It searches by meaning as well as by words.

🔒 Why it matters that nothing is uploaded

Unpublished drafts, a supervisor's comments, interview transcripts and ethics-restricted data often sit in the same folder as published papers. AskFolder reads the folder in your browser, so none of it is sent to a server, and you don't need to check a third party's data policy against your ethics approval.

✍️ It finds, it doesn't write

AskFolder doesn't generate summaries or answers. Every result is text that's actually in your files, at the page it shows. For a literature review that's the point: you read and judge the source, and nothing is made up.

🧰 Practical tips

🏷️ Name files "Author-Year-short-title.pdf"; the file name appears with every answer.
📁 One folder per chapter or topic searches faster and ranks better than everything at once.
🖨️ Old scanned papers (journal back issues, photocopied chapters) are read with OCR: the free version reads the first three scanned pages, Pro reads them all.
📚 The free version reads up to 50 files per folder; Pro reads folders of any size and keeps them ready between visits.