Say f: X → Y is a morphism of schemes. The sheaf direct image functor f<sub>★</sub> always has a left adjoint, namely the sheaf inverse image functor f<sup>★</sup> (with tensoring). >Under what (sufficient) conditions do we know that f<sub>★</sub> has a *right* adjoint? What is it? **Answer to a related question (edit):** If f<sub>★</sub> preserves quasicoherence, then its restriction to quasicoherents f<sub>★</sub>: QCoh(X) → QCoh(Y) has a right adjoint when f is *affine* (in particular, any closed immersion or finite morphism will do). The basic idea is to globalize the affine case (see Eric Wofsey's answer below); thanks to Pablo Solis for pointing me to [page 6 of Ravi Vakil's notes explaining this][1]. In this question, I'm *not* restricting to the quasi-coherent categories. One reason for working with non-quasicoherents is that j<sub>!</sub> , the "extension by zero" right adjoint to j<sup>★</sup> for an open immersion j, doesn't take qcoh to qcoh. [1]: http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/0506-216/216class5354.pdf