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congcongwang0122/zotero-skill

13PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A plugin that connects AI coding assistants like Claude Code or Cursor to your local Zotero reference library, letting you search papers, export BibTeX citations, read PDFs, and insert citations into LaTeX documents without leaving your editor.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((zotero-skill))
    Search and Browse
      Search by keyword
      List collections
      Browse tags
    Citation Workflow
      Export to BibTeX
      Insert LaTeX citation
      Auto cite command
    PDF Access
      Read indexed PDFs
      Full text content
    AI Integration
      Claude Code skill
      Cursor skill
      Codex skill
    Setup
      Local network only
      No external servers
      Enable Zotero API
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Search your Zotero library by keyword and pull up references while writing or coding, without switching apps.

USE CASE 2

Automatically export citations to a BibTeX file and insert the correct citation command into your LaTeX document in one step.

USE CASE 3

Ask an AI assistant to read all papers in a Zotero collection and generate a literature review or summary.

USE CASE 4

Read the full text of PDFs already saved in Zotero so an AI can answer questions about specific papers.

Tech stack

PythonZoteroBibTeXLaTeXZotero Local API

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Enable the local API in Zotero preferences (one-time step). The plugin is a single Python script with no extra packages needed. Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

No license information was mentioned in the explanation.

In plain English

Zotero-skill is a plugin for AI coding assistants that connects to Zotero, a popular reference management program used by researchers to organize academic papers and citations. The README is written in Chinese. The plugin lets you ask an AI assistant to search your Zotero library, export references, read PDF content, and insert citations into documents, all without leaving your coding or writing environment. Zotero keeps a local database of papers you have collected, and this tool talks to it directly over a local network connection on your own computer. Nothing is sent to external servers. The connection works through a Zotero feature that lets other programs communicate with the running desktop client. You need to enable that setting once in Zotero's preferences, and then the plugin can reach your entire library. The main capabilities include searching your references by keyword, listing your collections and tags, exporting your library to a BibTeX file for use in LaTeX documents, and reading the full text of PDFs that Zotero has already indexed on your machine. There is also a command that automates the full citation workflow: given a search term, it finds the matching reference, adds it to a BibTeX file, and inserts the appropriate citation command into your LaTeX source file in one step. The tool is built as a single Python script that uses only the Python standard library, meaning no additional packages need to be installed. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The script is designed to be invoked by AI agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor as a skill, meaning the agent reads the skill definition and knows how to call the script's commands when you make requests involving your reference library. The README's headline example is asking an AI to read all the papers in a given Zotero collection and write a 10,000-word literature review.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Search my Zotero library for papers about transformer attention mechanisms and list the top 5 results with their authors and year.
Prompt 2
Export all references in my Zotero collection called 'ML Papers' to a BibTeX file named references.bib.
Prompt 3
Read the PDF content of the paper titled 'Attention Is All You Need' from my Zotero library and summarize its key contributions in plain English.
Prompt 4
Find the Zotero reference matching 'variational autoencoder Kingma', add it to my references.bib file, and insert the citation into my paper at the current cursor position.
Prompt 5
Read all papers in my Zotero collection called 'Literature Review' and write a 1000-word synthesis covering the main themes and findings.
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