diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 94b000e..91e9310 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -108,6 +108,18 @@ Reading a paper is not the same as reading a blogpost or a novel. Here are a few
 
 * Love a Paper - [@loveapaper](https://twitter.com/loveapaper)
 
+### Download papers
+
+Open your favourite terminal and run:
+
+```bash
+$ ./scripts/download.sh
+```
+
+This will scrape markdown files for links to PDFs and download papers to their respective directories.
+
+See [README.md](./scripts/README.md) for more options.
+
 ## Contributing Guidelines
 
 Please take a look at our [CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) file.
diff --git a/scripts/README.md b/scripts/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb4e7e5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/scripts/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+# Scripts
+
+Scripts for working with repository content.
+
+## Download Utility
+A convenience script to download papers. This will scrape the README.md files for URLs containing links to pdfs and download them to their respective directories.
+
+The download utility is idempotent and can be run multiple times safely.
+
+### Usage
+Open your favourite terminal and run:
+
+```bash
+$ ./scripts/download.sh
+```
+
+
+Optionally, to download specific topics specify their directories as arguments:
+
+```bash
+$ ./scripts/download.sh android concurrency
+```
diff --git a/scripts/download.sh b/scripts/download.sh
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..d5139d4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/scripts/download.sh
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+#!/bin/bash
+
+# Guard clause check if required binaries are installed
+which wget > /dev/null || { echo "Error: wget not installed." ; exit 1 ; }
+which egrep > /dev/null || { echo "Error: egrep not installed." ; exit 1 ; }
+
+# Recursively traverse directories in repo scraping markdown file for URLs
+# containing pdfs. Downloads pdfs into respective directories.
+download_for_directory() {
+    cd $1 || { echo "Error: directory not found." ; exit 1 ; }
+
+    for f in *; do
+        if [[ -d ${f} ]]; then
+            download_for_directory ${f} &
+        fi
+    done
+
+    # Scrape URLs from markdown files
+    urls=$(ls | cat *.md 2> /dev/null | egrep -o 'https?://[^ ]+' | grep '\.pdf' | tr -d ')')
+
+    for url in "$urls"; do
+        # Ignore empty URLs
+        if [[ ! -z ${url} ]]; then
+            wget ${url} --no-clobber --quiet --timeout=5 --tries=2
+        fi
+    done
+    
+    cd ..
+    echo "$1 done."
+}
+
+# If no directories are supplied, iterate over the entire repo.
+if [[ "$#" -eq 0 ]]; then
+    REPO_ROOT_DIR="$(dirname $0)/.."
+    download_for_directory ${REPO_ROOT_DIR}
+else
+# Iterate over the specified directories
+    for dir in "$@"
+    do
+        download_for_directory ${dir}
+    done
+fi
+
+# Wait for child processes to terminate
+wait
+