Will the extracted text include the abstract, body, and references separately?

The output is continuous plain text following the PDF's internal structure. Sections like abstract, body, and references are included but not automatically labeled or separated — they appear in the order the PDF encodes them.

Can I use this for a systematic review with 100+ articles?

The tool supports batches of up to 50 PDFs at a time. For 100+ articles, run two or more batches. Each file can be up to 300 MB, which covers all standard journal article formats.

Are PDFs from JSTOR or PubMed compatible?

Yes, as long as they contain an embedded (selectable) text layer, which most digitally published journal PDFs do. Older scanned articles without a text layer are not supported.

Can I import the output directly into NVivo or MAXQDA?

Yes — both tools accept plain text files (.txt) as importable documents. UTF-8 encoding is fully compatible with both platforms.

Extract Plain Text from Journal Articles and Research PDFs

Systematic reviews and qualitative content analysis require getting text out of dozens or hundreds of PDF articles — and doing it manually is not viable at scale. Deliteful extracts the embedded text from research PDFs into plain UTF-8 files, giving you clean input for NVivo, MAXQDA, Python text analysis, or manual coding workflows.

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Academic researchers conducting literature reviews or corpus-based analysis frequently encounter PDFs from journal databases (JSTOR, PubMed, Scopus) that are selectable but not easily extractable in bulk. Copy-pasting from Acrobat introduces formatting noise; purpose-built extraction produces clean line-by-line text that coding tools can ingest directly. For a corpus of 50 articles, one batch run replaces an afternoon of manual extraction.

Page breaks are preserved in the output, which is useful when your analysis methodology requires page-level citation (e.g., APA in-text citations with page numbers). Files up to 300 MB are supported — large enough for book-length PDFs or multi-chapter dissertations. Output is UTF-8 plain text, compatible with every major qualitative and quantitative text analysis tool.

How it works

1
Sign in with Google
Create a free Deliteful account in about 3 clicks.
2
Upload your research PDFs
Add journal articles, dissertations, or reports — up to 50 files per batch.
3
Extract text
Deliteful processes each PDF and extracts the embedded text layer server-side.
4
Download and import
Each output .txt file maps one-to-one with its source PDF, with page separators intact for citation tracing.

Frequently asked questions

Will the extracted text include the abstract, body, and references separately?: The output is continuous plain text following the PDF's internal structure. Sections like abstract, body, and references are included but not automatically labeled or separated — they appear in the order the PDF encodes them.
Can I use this for a systematic review with 100+ articles?: The tool supports batches of up to 50 PDFs at a time. For 100+ articles, run two or more batches. Each file can be up to 300 MB, which covers all standard journal article formats.
Are PDFs from JSTOR or PubMed compatible?: Yes, as long as they contain an embedded (selectable) text layer, which most digitally published journal PDFs do. Older scanned articles without a text layer are not supported.
Can I import the output directly into NVivo or MAXQDA?: Yes — both tools accept plain text files (.txt) as importable documents. UTF-8 encoding is fully compatible with both platforms.

Create your free Deliteful account with Google and extract clean text from your entire research corpus without manual copy-paste.