Chat With Papers And PDFs
Ask questions across your saved papers and get answers grounded in your own library, not the open web.
For Researchers
Mindly for Researchers
Papers, quotes, screenshots, datasets, interview transcripts, and half-formed ideas in one Mac library. Mindly captures them as you read and lets AI surface the connections that turn three years of notes into a working argument. On your machine, free to start.
What you get
A Second Brain That Keeps Up With The Literature
Papers, quotes, and sources stay connected in one place, so the argument you are building never falls apart between sessions.
Watch The Literature Connect
The mind map links related papers, notes, and quotes so the shape of the field stays visible.
Think Out Loud, Keep The Transcript
Capture ideas mid-walk or mid-experiment. Mindly transcribes and files them with the rest of the project.
Search Across Every Source
Quotes, PDFs, notes, and links are all one search away, months after you saved them.
Research setups
Six Concrete Ways Researchers Actually Use Mindly
Paper inbox
Drop every PDF and link into one inbox as you find them. New papers from RSS feeds, recommendations from colleagues, hits from a database search. Skim the AI summaries to triage what deserves a full read this week. The papers that get a full read get highlights and your own notes attached; the ones that do not still stay searchable in case they become relevant in eight months.
Quote library with sources intact
Snippet quotes and excerpts with the source paper attached. When writing, search by concept rather than by paper. The right citation for a specific argument comes back in seconds rather than the half-day archaeology of opening twelve PDFs and Cmd+F-ing through them. Sources stay linked, so the citation never gets separated from its evidence.
Topic clusters and the mind map
Let AI link related saves automatically. The mind map exposes adjacent literature you read months apart but did not connect at the time. Researchers consistently report this is where their best paper ideas come from, especially in interdisciplinary work where the contribution lives at the seam between two fields.
Interview transcripts and qualitative material
Record interviews directly into Mindly or upload existing audio. Transcription happens automatically. AI tags by themes that emerge across the corpus, which is the kind of thematic analysis that qualitative researchers usually do by hand over weeks. The library version is searchable across all transcripts at once, so finding every interview where a specific concept came up takes seconds.
Synthesis sessions
Block an afternoon to review one cluster end to end. Open the relevant tag in Mindly and walk through papers, your notes, transcripts, and voice memos in sequence. Capture conclusions as new notes that link back to the underlying sources. The synthesis writeup that used to require recovering scattered material now happens in the same session as the review.
Draft scratchpad next to the evidence
Draft sections of your paper or grant proposal inside Mindly, with the evidence you are citing one shortcut away. Pull quotes from your quote library, summaries from the papers you read, snippets from interview transcripts. The draft and the evidence live in the same library rather than across three apps, which removes the constant context-switching tax that slows most research writing.
Common questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best note app for academic researchers on Mac?
For researchers who work across PDFs, voice memos, interview transcripts, and their own draft writing, Mindly is the closest fit on Mac in 2026. The key advantages over Notion, Obsidian, or DEVONthink for research use are that AI handles tagging and summarization automatically, the full text of every PDF (including scanned ones) is indexed, voice memos transcribe and join the library next to other sources, and the mind map surfaces cross-source adjacencies that researchers usually have to find by hand. For pure citation management Mindly is not a Zotero replacement; it sits next to Zotero as the synthesis and writing layer.
How does Mindly compare to Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote?
Those are reference managers. They handle bibliographic data, citation insertion in Word or LaTeX, and metadata import from databases. Mindly is a different layer. It handles the actual content of your research: the full text of papers, the AI summaries, the voice memos, the interview transcripts, the synthesis writing. Most researchers who switch to Mindly keep Zotero or EndNote for citations and use Mindly as the day-to-day library where reading and thinking actually happen. The two stack cleanly because they do different jobs.
Does Mindly OCR scanned PDFs and old paper documents?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and image-only papers are OCR'd on save, so the text becomes searchable and gets the same AI tagging treatment as a native text PDF. For historical research that often involves photographed archives or scanned facsimiles, this is the feature that turns an unsearchable folder of images into a real searchable library. OCR runs in the background after the save, so the capture itself does not block on the processing time.
Is Mindly safe for embargoed drafts, IRB-bound transcripts, and confidential research?
Your library lives in a Mindly directory on your Mac, not on a vendor server. AI processing happens over encrypted channels and content is not retained on Mindly servers after the request completes. For most research privacy requirements (NDA-bound collaboration, IRB-approved interview material that must stay on a specific device, embargoed manuscripts, ongoing peer review) the on-device library plus no-retention AI is the right combination. For research subject to specific HIPAA or equivalent regulatory requirements, check the privacy policy and the institution's data handling rules before using cloud AI features on identifiable data.
Does AI tagging work for non-English papers and multilingual research?
Yes. Mindly's AI organization is multilingual. PDFs and notes in German, French, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and other major languages get tagged accurately, and semantic search works across languages, so a query in English can surface relevant material in another language. For researchers working with non-English source material (history, regional studies, ethnography, comparative politics) this tends to be a significant practical advantage over English-first note apps.
Go deeper
How to Build a Research Second Brain
The full playbook behind this page: the reasoning, the habits, and answers to the questions this page does not cover.
Read the guideTurn three years of reading into a working argument
Install Mindly free for Mac and start with one open project. Drop the next ten papers, two interviews, and your draft section in. The synthesis the literature review needs starts to surface from the saves within the first week.