What leaves your Mac when you check references
Your thesis, manuscript or students' submissions stay on your Mac. Benthic sends only what a lookup needs, mostly DOIs, titles and authors. Here is each connection and why.
A thesis draft, an unpublished manuscript, a folder of student submissions: these are texts you would not upload to just any website. Checking their references still means asking outside databases whether each source exists. So the real question is what those databases get to see.
What never leaves the Mac
Your documents. When you check a whole thesis, Benthic reads the PDF, Word, LaTeX or text file on your Mac, finds the bibliography and the citations in it, and compares the two there. Direct quotations are compared with the downloaded full text on your Mac too, and finding the passage behind a citation runs offline. When the sentence and the source are in different languages, the app translates the sentence on the Mac first. A lecturer's batch check works the same way: the submissions stay where they are.
Your library, projects, check history and PDFs stay on the Mac as well. Settings, the library index, projects and history are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/Benthic; the PDFs go to your download folder, by default ~/Documents/Benthic. Benthic has no account, no cloud and no server of its own, so there is nowhere else for any of it to go.
What goes to the scholarly services
To check a reference, Benthic has to ask someone who knows the literature. It sends the details of the reference itself: the DOI, or, when there is no DOI or a wrong one, the title and authors (plus the year, to narrow the search). The recipients are public scholarly services: Crossref, OpenAlex, doi.org and Europe PMC, and for books and chapters without a DOI also Semantic Scholar and Open Library. When Benthic fetches a paper, the open-access sources receive its DOI, and the repository or publisher that hosts the PDF sees a download request, much as it would from your browser. Where Benthic offers a link through your library proxy, opening it happens in your browser, as any visit to your library's website does.
Three services also receive the e-mail address you gave during setup. Unpaywall requires one with every request. Crossref and OpenAlex ask for one and answer such requests in their “polite pool”. If you leave the field empty, your address goes nowhere.
For journal levels, Benthic asks the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) by ISSN, the journal's own number, which says nothing about the article or about you. You can switch this off in Settings under Journals and lists.
What runs on a schedule
The retraction watch sends the DOIs of your project sources to Crossref and OpenAlex once a day, in batches, to learn whether any of them was retracted or corrected since. Only DOIs travel. You can switch it off in Projects, for all projects or for a single one.
The DOAJ lists of questionable journals are downloaded at most once a week. That is a plain download of a public list: nothing about you or your references is sent. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, off by default, works the same way.
Zotero is reached only on 127.0.0.1, which is your own Mac, through the same local connector that Zotero's browser extension uses. To scan your Zotero library for retractions, Benthic reads a copy of its database and never writes to it.
No account, no telemetry
Benthic collects no usage data: nothing about how you use the app is sent anywhere. Its only connection to benthic.isoglu.com is the update check at launch, which fetches a small file without any identifier. The website measures visits only if you agree in its cookie banner, and that has nothing to do with the app.
One thing is outside Benthic's hands. If you connect an AI assistant, the tools run on your Mac, but the assistant sees what they return, for example a check report or the text of a paper it reads. The assistant you use decides where that goes.
Why this matters for theses and manuscripts
A thesis before submission, a manuscript under review and a student's coursework have one thing in common: the author has not published them, and someone may have promised to keep them confidential. A reviewer can check a manuscript's references without the manuscript going anywhere. If your university restricts where students' work may be uploaded, a batch check uploads nothing; only the reference details are looked up, entry by entry.
You do not have to take this on trust. Settings › Usage and limits counts every request Benthic makes, per service, and the “Log of the latest requests” shows the most recent ones with their addresses, with e-mail addresses and keys masked. A thesis check shows up there as a series of lookups by DOI or title, never as an upload. The privacy section of the product page has the short version, the source code on GitHub the long one, and the installation post explains why the setup asks for your e-mail address in the first place.