Zotero

Zotero MCP: Chat with your Research Library—Local or Web—in Claude, ChatGPT, and more.

Zotero MCP connects your Zotero research library with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants (e.g., Cherry Studio, Chorus, Cursor) via the Model Context Protocol. Search your library, read and annotate papers, add and organize items, and find research by meaning.

AI agents: read docs/for-agents.md first. It covers which route to use, setup, and the commands in one place.

✨ What it does

• 🔍 Search by title, author, tag, collection, full text, or meaning (semantic search with local, OpenAI, Gemini, or Ollama embeddings)
• 📚 Read metadata, BibTeX, full text, and page ranges of PDFs, with page images where text extraction garbles math, figures, and tables
• 📝 Annotate: highlights and area boxes placed on the exact words, figure, table, or equation; notes; PDF annotation extraction
• ✏️ Write: add papers by DOI, URL, ISBN, BibTeX, or file (with open-access PDFs), manage collections and tags, merge duplicates
• 💻 Local or web: in local mode reads come straight from zotero.sqlite; writes go to the running Zotero 10+ or through the web API
• 🪶 Two ways in: an MCP server for chat apps, or zotero-cli plus an agent skill for coding agents
• 📊 Scite citation tallies and retraction alerts (optional)

🚀 Quick start

1. Install (Python 3.10+):

uv tool install zotero-mcp-server     # or: pip install zotero-mcp-server

New to the command line? Try the community-built Zotero MCP Setup: a macOS GUI installer, one-click scripts for Mac and Windows, and a step-by-step guide.

2. Enable Zotero's local API: in Zotero 7+, open Settings → Advanced and tick Allow other applications on this computer to communicate with Zotero.

3. Connect your assistant:

zotero-mcp setup      # auto-configures Claude Desktop

or add the server by hand (Claude Desktop: claude_desktop_config.json; Claude Code: ~/.claude.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zotero": {
      "command": "zotero-mcp",
      "env": { "ZOTERO_LOCAL": "true" }
    }
  }
}

4. Writes (optional): on Zotero 10+, run zotero-mcp authorize-local once and choose Always Allow. On older Zotero, add ZOTERO_API_KEY and ZOTERO_LIBRARY_ID to write through the web API.

Then ask things like "Find papers in my library on attention mechanisms", "Summarize the key findings of this paper", or "Highlight the main claims of this PDF".

ChatGPT, Cherry Studio, Chorus, Autohand, and other clients: see Getting started.

Optional extras

The base install covers search, reading, annotations, and writes. Heavier features are extras:

Update any time with zotero-mcp update.

🪶 MCP server or agent skill?

If your agent has a shell (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, Amp, OpenCode …), one command teaches it to drive zotero-cli:

zotero-mcp install-skill

An MCP server sends every tool's schema on every request, before you type anything. The skill costs 98 tokens until the agent decides it is relevant:

Use the MCP server when your client speaks MCP but has no shell (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT); use the skill when it has a shell. Both share one config. Details: CLI and agent skill.

📖 Documentation

Website: stevenyuyy.com/zotero-mcp · Changelog

🤝 Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Run the tests with uv run pytest tests/. A live integration test plan, meant to be run by Claude against a real library, is in docs/integration-test-plan.md.

☕ Support

Zotero MCP is free and MIT-licensed.

If it saves you or your lab time, sponsoring helps cover the unglamorous parts: Windows and WSL2 edge cases, Zotero schema changes, group-library support, and the embedding/search infrastructure.

Labs and institutions: the $50 and $200 tiers are meant to be expensable, and include priority triage on the issues affecting your workflow.

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who has contributed code, fixes, and ideas to Zotero MCP.

📄 License

MIT