Zotero MCP

Zotero MCP connects your agent to your Zotero research library. It's an open-source community project by Steven Yu (54yyyu on GitHub), not made by the Zotero project. Your agent can search your papers, read them, highlight and take notes, and add or organize items. What you can do with it - Search by title, author, tag, collection or full text, or by meaning with semantic search (an optional extra) - Read metadata, BibTeX, full text and chosen PDF pages, with page images where text extraction garbles math, figures or tables - Highlight passages, box figures, tables and equations, and create or edit notes - Pull together the highlights and notes across a paper or a collection - Add papers by DOI, URL, ISBN, BibTeX or file, with open-access PDFs attached, and manage collections and tags - Format a bibliography or in-text citations with Zotero's citation styles - Turn on optional tool groups for Scite citation tallies and retraction checks, duplicate merging, related papers via OpenAlex, feeds and item relations How it connects It runs on your machine with uvx zotero-mcp-server serve (Python 3.10 or newer). Choose a mode with environment variables: - Local: set ZOTERO_LOCAL=true, and in Zotero 7 or newer tick "Allow other applications on this computer to communicate with Zotero" under Settings, Advanced. No account is needed to read. - Web API: set ZOTERO_API_KEY (from zotero.org/settings/keys) and ZOTERO_LIBRARY_ID, plus ZOTERO_LIBRARY_TYPE=group for a group library. Without one of these the server starts, but its tools can't reach your library. Good to know - Writing to a local library needs Zotero 10 or newer: run zotero-mcp authorize-local once and choose Always Allow. On older Zotero, add the web API key and library ID, and writes go through the web API. - ZOTERO_MCP_TOOLSETS picks which optional tool groups it exposes. Every tool it exposes is sent with each request, so the optional ones are off by default. - Its docs cover Claude Desktop and Claude Code. Agents with a shell, such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, can use the same package's agent skill (zotero-mcp install-skill), which drives zotero-cli instead. - ChatGPT can only reach it through a tunnel you run yourself, in Developer mode. The server has no sign-in of its own, so keep that address private.

• “Search my library for papers on machine learning.”

  1. zotero_search_items
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• “Find recent articles I've added about climate change.”

  1. zotero_get_recent
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• “Summarize the key findings from my paper on quantum computing.”

  1. zotero_search_items
  2. zotero_get_item_fulltext