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tokens: the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds ( Crawford et al. 2001 ; Ridley et al. 2013 ); but also non-detections towards, for example, dwarf spheroidal galaxies ( Rubio-Herrera Maccarone 2013 ). In addition, several efforts have been made to capture periodic as well as single pulse signals from nearby galaxies, with different telescopes. Unfortunately none of these searches discovered new sources. For the deepest of such past surveys, we list the frequencies and sensitivities in Table 1 . These frequencies range from 328–1440 MHz. Based on the facts that at lower frequencies pulsar beams get wider and pulsar fluxes get higher ( Stappers et al. 2011 ), there is a possibility that deep, lower-frequency surveys could find pulsars that these past efforts have missed. Table 2 LOFAR Observations of nearby galaxies M 33, M 81, and M 82. Notes. For tied-array rings (TARs) only the coordinates of the central tied-array beam (TAB) are provided. The LOw Frequency Array (LOFAR, van Haarlem et al. 2013 ) is a radio telescope capable of tracking several nearby galaxies, at long wavelengths. The LOFAR high-band antenna’s (HBA, 120–240 MHz) frequency range approximately coincides with the peak of pulsar flux density distribution (100–200 MHz, Stappers et al. 2011 ), which is an advantage for a pulsar search. Compared to previous low-frequency pulsar searches, further improvements such as the much increased bandwidth (), the high core gain (), and the relatively low antenna temperature (, see Eq. (3) from van Leeuwen Stappers 2010 ) mean that LOFAR can, on the one hand, find many new interesting pulsars (see Coenen et al. 2014 ), and on the other hand, better investigate their fundamental emission peculiarities (see Stappers et al. 2011 ). In general, pulsar beams are thought to be wider at lower frequencies, giving LOFAR the advantage in capturing radio pulses over higher-frequency surveys. Finally, the LOFAR multi-beaming allows for efficient, deep integrations at a sensitivity and field of view unparalleled in the world. The main downside of searching for pulsars with LOFAR is that dispersion and scattering degrade the inherently sharp pulsar peaks. In this paper, we describe the searches we have performed with LOFAR for pulsars in spiral Triangulum Galaxy M 33 (distance ), Bode’s Galaxy M 81 (), and starburst Cigar Galaxy M 82 (). Given their northern positions (see Table 2 ), these three galaxies can be well targeted with LOFAR, as the projected effective area of LOFAR’s fixed dipoles, and thus the sensitivity, is the highest close to zenith (see van Leeuwen Stappers 2010 ). The origin and current environment of a galaxy inevitably affect its star-formation rate and mass-energy distribution. As a result, the pulsar population in nearby galaxies can be different from that of our Milky Way, and a comparison between this population and that of our Milky Way is interesting. Furthermore, measuring a dispersion measure (DM) toward an extragalactic pulsar