Duct for research and academia
Find the paper, the page and the quote, even offline.
Duct searches every PDF, book and note on your laptop and takes you straight to the passage.
macOS, Windows and Linux · No account needed · Open source
Post-colonial land tenure reform in West Africa followed three patterns…
Open at p. 112
The problem
Hundreds of downloaded papers, theses, e-books and lecture notes with names like “download (3).pdf”. You remember reading a finding but not where. And campus internet is often slow or expensive.
What Duct does
- Finds a phrase across hundreds of PDFs in milliseconds, fully offline, and opens the paper at the page.
- Reads EPUB e-books chapter by chapter, Word and LaTeX files, and slides.
- Copy a citation (APA or BibTeX) from the paper’s own title, author and year.
- File names are searchable too, and word forms match: “regulate” finds “regulation”.
How it works for research and academia
- 1
Drop in your library
Every paper, thesis, e-book and set of lecture notes, whatever they’re called.
- 2
Search the phrase you remember
Quoted phrases, word forms and file names, in milliseconds, with no internet.
- 3
Cite it
Open the paper at the page and copy a citation in APA or BibTeX.
Made for this work
The parts of Duct you’ll use most.
Citations from the paper itself
Duct reads the title, author and year that PDFs and Word files carry, so “Copy citation” gives you a reference, not a file name.
Fully offline
Search, OCR and the viewer work with no connection: in the library, on the bus, or on campus Wi-Fi that isn’t working today.
Books, slides and notes too
EPUB e-books are searched chapter by chapter, and lecture slides by slide number, alongside papers and your own notes.
Reads the files you already have
No converting, no uploading. Duct reads 99 file types where they are.
Search you can verify
Every result names the file and the page it came from, and opens the document there with your words highlighted. Your documents stay on your computer or your own server.
Which plan
Free. Pro adds AI answers across your library.
Compare plans →Questions
Is it really free?
Yes. Everything on your own computer is free, with no account and no limit on documents.
What about papers with useless file names?
Duct searches what’s inside, and shows the paper’s own title where it has one.
Can I search scanned book chapters?
Yes. Turn on OCR in Settings and Duct reads scanned pages too.
Other teams using Duct
Find the paper, the page and the quote, even offline.
macOS, Windows and Linux · No account needed · Open source