https://grobid.org/about

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6    <title>About GROBID Tools: Independent PDF Extractor, Not the Official GROBID</title>
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30            <a href="/" class="brand">📄 GROBID Tools</a>
31            <ul>
32                <li><a href="/">Extractor</a></li>
33                <li><a href="/guides/what-is-grobid">What is GROBID?</a></li>
34                <li><a href="/guides/">Guides</a></li>
35                <li><a href="/formats/">Formats</a></li>
36                <li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
37                <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
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43        <h1>About GROBID Tools</h1>
44        <p class="meta">Last reviewed on October 3, 2026</p>
45
46        <p>GROBID Tools is a small, focused web utility for extracting bibliographic metadata and citation data from PDF documents. The entire pipeline — file reading, text extraction, metadata heuristics, and export generation — runs inside the visitor's browser using PDF.js and pdf-lib. Nothing about a chosen file is uploaded to a server.</p>
47
48        <h2>Who the site is for</h2>
49        <p>The tool is built for readers who routinely handle academic and technical PDFs and want a fast way to pull structured information out of them without installing software or sending the file to a remote service. Typical visitors include:</p>
50        <ul>
51            <li>Researchers building reading lists, literature reviews, and reference libraries.</li>
52            <li>Graduate and undergraduate students assembling bibliographies for theses, essays, and lab reports.</li>
53            <li>Librarians, archivists, and information professionals organising collections of digital papers.</li>
54            <li>Developers and data engineers who want a quick way to inspect what is actually inside a PDF before writing parsing code of their own.</li>
55        </ul>
56
57        <h2>What the tool covers</h2>
58        <p>The extractor focuses on the structured information that is most useful when working with scholarly and technical PDFs. That includes the document title, author names, publication year, abstract, keywords, page count, and persistent identifiers such as DOI, ArXiv ID, PubMed ID, and ISBN where they appear. The tool also attempts to detect a references section and split it into 

58individual citations, pulling out DOIs and URLs per entry where they are present.</p>
59        <p>Outputs can be exported to JSON, plain text, Markdown, Microsoft Word (.docx), BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON. The export step also runs in the browser, so the file never travels over the network.</p>
60
61        <h2>Editorial approach</h2>
62        <p>The written guides on this site explain how PDF metadata is structured, how citation parsing actually works in practice, and what to expect when an automated tool encounters a messy or scanned document. The goal is to set realistic expectations: heuristic extraction is useful, but it is not a substitute for hand-curated metadata when accuracy is critical.</p>
63        <p>Articles are written from working experience with PDF tooling and from public, well-established documentation about formats such as BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON, and the PDF specification itself. Where a topic touches on a specific external service or standard, the relevant primary source is linked.</p>
64
65        <h2>How content is produced</h2>
66        <p>Every guide and reference page on the site is reviewed before publication and dated with a "Last reviewed on" line so readers can see how recently the information was checked. When formats, identifiers, or browser APIs change in a way that materially affects the guidance, the page is revisited and the date updated. Pages that no longer reflect current practice are corrected, marked as historical, or removed.</p>
67
68        <h2>Privacy by default</h2>
69        <p>The product decision that drives the site is simple: a researcher should be able to inspect a PDF without trusting a remote operator with its contents. That decision shapes the architecture (everything in the browser), the offline support (the page registers a service worker so it keeps working without a network connection), and the analytics (Google Analytics records page-level visit statistics such as pages viewed and device type; no file contents, file names, or extracted text are ever transmitted). The full data practice is described on the <a href="/privacy">privacy page</a>.</p>
70
71        <h2>Independence</h2>
72        <p>GROBID Tools is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained by the developers of GROBID, nor with any publisher, university, or commercial reference manager. The name reflects the shared problem space — extracting structured information from scholarly PDFs — not a partnership.</p>
73        <p>The in-browser extractor on this site does <strong>not</strong> run GROBID. It uses lightweight heuristics on top of PDF.js. If you are looking for the GROBID library itself:</p>
74        <ul>
75            <li>Source code and releases: <a href="https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid" rel="noopener">github.com/kermitt2/grobid</a></li>
76            <li>Official documentation: <a href="https://grobid.readthedocs.io/" rel="noopener">grobid.readthedocs.io</a></li>
77            <li>Our independent explainers: <a href="/guides/what-is-grobid">What is GROBID?</a>, <a href="/guides/grobid-docker-and-api">Running GROBID with Docker and the REST API</a>, and <a href="/guides/grobid-alternatives">GROBID alternatives</a>.</li>
78        </ul>
79
80        <h2>Contacting the site</h2>
81        <p>Corrections, broken-link reports, and feedback are welcome. The <a href="/contact">contact page</a> lists the current address.</p>
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