Your Personal Agentic
Reference Manager.

Organize papers, read and annotate PDFs, and export citations, with an AI assistant grounded in your own library. Works with OpenAI, Claude, or a fully local model.

Download for macOS See what's inside

Or install from Terminal

curl -LsSf https://refman.datavil.org/install.sh | sh

macOS Native · Apple Silicon · macOS 14+

Refman app showing a library of papers, metadata inspector, and PDF list

Grounded in your papers

Read with an AI research assistant

Ask questions, generate summaries, and explore key points, methods, and limitations while the source paper stays in view.

Refman PDF reader with the AI assistant summarizing the open research paper

Everything in one window

A complete workflow for your papers

From import to citation, Refman keeps your literature organized, searchable, and grounded.

Full-text search

SQLite with FTS5 indexes every paper. Search titles, authors, and the full text of your PDFs in milliseconds.

Smart import

Drag in a PDF and Refman scans for DOI/arXiv IDs, then resolves metadata from CrossRef and arXiv. .bib and .ris too.

Annotate as you read

A PDFKit reader with highlights, underlines, and notes, written into the PDF and mirrored to a searchable database.

Cite anywhere

Export clean BibTeX, RIS, or CSL-JSON. Your references travel wherever your writing goes.

Agentic assistant

Chat with OpenAI, Claude, or a local model. It calls library tools to ground answers in your actual papers. Your choice of agent.

Local or iCloud

Keep your library entirely on-device, or store it in iCloud Drive to reach it from every Mac. PDFs are content-addressed by SHA-256.

Get Refman

Download the latest release and drag it to your Applications folder.

Download for macOS