Advanced search options

You can use advanced search to find exactly what you're looking for in your library. Combine field searches and filters to narrow your results, or expand your search to include the full text of your PDFs and notes.

Click the slider button in the search box to access advanced search options.

Quick lookup

Quick lookup lets you quickly filter your library by authors, journals, folders, and labels. Use it to jump directly to a specific collection or filter without navigating through menus.

See Quick lookup for more details.

Switch to online search

The search bar finds references in your local library by default. To find new references directly from Paperpile, you can switch to online search.

See Search online for details on how to find new references.

Phrase search

Use phrase search to only show results that match the exact phrase. For example, typing "machine learning" in the search box finds only results with those words together in that order.

To use phrase search, type “ in the search box, or select Search exact phrase in the Advanced search options menu.

Negative search

Use negative search to exclude specific terms from results. For example, typing cancer not:lung in the search box finds references about cancer excluding lung cancer in your library.

To use negative search, type - in the search box, or select Exclude from search in the Advanced search options menu.

Field search

Restrict your search to specific fields by adding a field name followed by a colon before your search terms:

title: Search in titles only (title:CRISPR)
author: Search by author name (author:Smith)
year: Search by publication year ( year:2024)
abstract: Search in abstracts (abstract:methodology)
pdf: Search in PDF full text ( pdf:bioinformatics)

You can combine these for more precise searches. For example, author:Franklin year:1953 title:DNA finds publications by Franklin from 1953 with DNA in the title.

Tip: Start typing the field name to activate field search in the search box.

Include in search

By default, Paperpile searches reference titles, identifiers, publication years, authors, and journal names. You can expand your search to include additional content:

Abstracts: Search within reference abstracts.
Notes and annotations: Search your notes and PDF annotations.
PDF full text: Search the complete text of attached PDFs.

Turn these options on or off in the search options menu to control what content is included in your searches.

PDF full text search

Turn on PDF full text in the search options menu to search the complete text of your attached PDFs. Click any result snippet to open the PDF at the matching page with your search term highlighted.

Paperpile indexes all PDF attachments for full text search:

All PDF files attached to a reference are searchable, including the main PDF and supplementary files.
PDFs are indexed up to 100 pages. Content beyond page 100 is not searchable.
Scanned PDFs cannot be searched as text because Paperpile doesn't currently support OCR (optical character recognition).

Note: References without PDFs are searchable by their metadata (title, authors, year, etc.). Only references with attached PDFs can be searched by PDF full text when this option is turned on.

Keyboard shortcuts

Search shortcuts that work anywhere in your library

Search library: Press the \ key to jump to the search box.
Clear search box: Press Esc to clear the search box.
Quick lookup: Press @ to open Quick lookup.
Online search: Press Plus sign (+) to search online.

Phrase search: Wrap your search terms in quotes (“) to find an exact phrase.
Negative search: Add a minus sign - before terms you want to exclude from results.
Field search: Add a field prefix to search specific fields: title:, author:, year:, abstract:, or pdf:.

Advanced search options