Six modules that work together rather than side by side — because a paper you read, the note you made about it, and the project it feeds are the same piece of thinking.
A research project is not a folder — it has a shape, and that shape differs by discipline. ResearchVault starts you from a template built for your field, then gets out of the way.
Biotechnology, AI & Computer Science, Engineering, Medical, Social Science, and Custom — start blank and define your own sections.
The template's sections turn into the project's tabs: research question, literature review, hypothesis, protocol, results, analysis, publication.
Each project keeps the template as it was when created, so editing a template never rewrites a project already underway.
Section progress is never inferred from word count — only you know when a section is genuinely done.
Add the dates that matter and they appear on your dashboard and calendar automatically, with overdue ones surfaced first.
Planning, active, on hold, completed, archived — filter the list by any of them and see counts without opening a thing.
Three ways in, one library. Import the PDF, look it up by DOI, or type the reference by hand — a paper without a file is still a paper worth keeping.
Importing a PDF reads its text so the whole paper becomes searchable, and guesses the title from page one for you to confirm.
Paste a DOI or a doi.org link and the title, authors, journal, year and abstract arrive filled in. The only feature that touches the internet, and only when you ask.
Read inside the app, select text and highlight it in colour, and add a comment. Highlights are stored in your vault — never written into the original PDF.
Copy a citation in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago or BibTeX, formatted from your stored fields with no network and no citation service.
Queue what to read next and it appears on your dashboard in order. Unread, reading, read — the state you actually care about.
The same file or the same DOI is recognised before anything is written, so importing twice opens what you already have instead of doubling your library.
A research note records what you observed. An idea captures what might be worth trying. A meeting note keeps what was agreed. Each asks for the fields that kind actually needs — and each can point at anything else in your vault.
Research notes ask for topic and summary; ideas ask for potential impact and next steps; meeting notes ask for attendees and actions.
Headings, bold, lists, checklists, quotes and code blocks — stored in an open format and exportable as clean Markdown.
Type two brackets and a name to link a paper, project or another note. Link something that does not exist yet and it connects itself the moment it does.
Every note shows what points at it, not just what it points to — which is how you find the thinking you had forgotten was related.
Pinned notes sort above the rest, so the note you are living in this week is always the first one you see.
Every note becomes a .md file with its fields and links intact — readable in Obsidian, or in any text editor in twenty years' time.
The everyday layer. What needs doing, when it is due, and where the files live.
Overdue first, then today, this week, later — the only ordering a task list is ever actually read in.
Paste several lines at once and each becomes its own task, which is the shape actions arrive in from a meeting.
Task due dates and project milestones appear automatically, read from the tasks and projects themselves — change a date there and it changes here.
Documents, images, datasets and attachments in one place, filed by type automatically, with the original left exactly where you put it.
Drop a PDF into your vault's Inbox folder and it is imported on its own — no dialog, no clicking, no import step to remember.
Your files sit in ordinary folders you can open in Explorer. Nothing is hidden inside an opaque database blob.
One keystroke, everything. Ctrl+K opens a command palette that searches your whole vault — and runs the few things worth running from a keyboard.
Search does not stop at titles and tags — it reaches the extracted text of every PDF you have imported.
Projects, papers, notes, tasks and files in labelled groups, with the matching phrase shown in context so you can tell which hit you want.
Arrow keys walk every result, Enter opens, Escape closes. Never reach for the mouse mid-thought.
The index updates itself as you write. Nothing to rebuild, though you can force a rebuild from Settings if you ever want to.
Templates are what make one workspace fit very different disciplines. Here is how the Biotechnology template maps a wet-lab project onto ResearchVault — and the same principle applies to an engineering build log or a social-science study.
Log cultures, vectors, reagents and tissue samples as structured notes — location down to the freezer compartment, batch identifiers and expiry dates, all searchable.
Record incubation temperatures, concentrations, centrifuge speeds and buffer ratios in the protocol section, so a run can be repeated exactly — by you or by a colleague.
Sequences, trial results and unpublished findings never leave your machine. For work under an NDA or a pre-publication embargo, that is not a preference — it is a requirement.
Local-first only works if getting your data out is trivial. Two separate promises: a backup you can restore, and an export other software can read.
Database and every file, in a single archive you can copy to an external drive or a cloud folder of your choosing.
Restore a backup onto a new machine and your vault comes back as it was. A backup from an older version is migrated forward automatically.
Export your library as CSV — title, authors, journal, year, DOI, reading state — ready for Excel or a reference manager.
Plain text with your structure intact. No proprietary format standing between you and your own writing.
Every research feature is in the free edition. The paid upgrade removes one banner — it does not unlock anything, because holding your own research to ransom would be a strange way to build a research tool.
| Capability | Free | Ad-Free |
|---|---|---|
| Projects, papers, notes, tasks, files | Included | Included |
| PDF reader, highlights & citations | Included | Included |
| Full-text search across PDFs | Included | Included |
| Backup, restore & export | Included | Included |
| All six interface languages | Included | Included |
| Storage limit | None — your disk | None — your disk |
| House banner at the foot of the window | Shown | Removed |
| Price | Free | One-time purchase |
The banner promotes VMH Digital's own software and is bundled inside the application — there is no ad network, no cookie, no advertising identifier, and nothing about you is collected in order to show it.
Research