zotero-skill

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.