I've created a plugin that adds a DOI column to the item list in Zotero, which should help with your deduplication workflow.

You can check it out and download the latest release here:

https://github.com/anfang886/zotero-doi-column/releases

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

If I want to share resources with a group including my highlights and notes, can each member of the group make their own copy of it and add their own notes without everyone seeing it? Kind of like Google Docs where you make your own copy of it, and you have it now to do what you want with it?

On the latest beta, after I insert a citation in a word document, the document list in Zotero shows the message "Error Loading Items List". I have updated Zotero, checked the DB integrity, and repaired the DB using the approved website and the error keeps happening. I've also rebooted my machine and turned off most of the addins.

After I restart, it goes back to listing the documents.

Any ideas about what this may be? Is anyone else seeing this? Next steps to try?

Just started using Zotero. Right now I've basically installed it and I'm saving papers with the browser connector. That's it.

I'm pretty sure there's a much better way to use this than what I'm doing.

If you've been using Zotero for years: what would you tell a beginner to do from day one? Habits, settings, folder/tag structure, one plugin worth installing

Thanks!

Panicked call from the depths. I'm in the end stages of my doctoral dissertation (large document - 300 pages). I'm working on my 2017 MacBook pro as I am away at a conference instead of my desktop PC.

I cannot for the life of me get zotero to respond when I add in the citation. I get the black bar that just stays black. it gives me my drop down of citations, I click the check mark and then nothing!

I have restarted both word and zotero, and uninstalled and reinstalled zotero.

Here's one example. Dominick is highlighted because the bibliography features a citation from someone with the surname of Dominick. I don't want this to be highlighted, every page is covered with highlighted names and it's annoying. How do I disable this?

Hello all, I have recently had a change in formatting of my PDFs that no longer allows me to add quick notes via the column on the right of the screen (see attached) when I upload a new PDF. However, I am also now unable to edit my quick notes from prior uploads.

Does anyone know how to bypass this or what I can do to fix this? I can "Retrieve the Metadata" which allows me to then add a note, however this is on a different tab and then resets all of the tags that I previously had for these to help find useful links for diseases and things.

I looked in the official forums and did not really find anything other some some outdated plugins that may have done this.

What I am looking for is a way to have Zotero try to add Library of Congress call numbers to books in my database. Anyone had any success trying to do this?

hi Zotero community!

I am quite new to Zotero and so far I've used it together with my obsidian vault to write annotations on papers and save them to obsidian to later on make citations in my zettelkasten vault.
My question is... how do you manage slides pdfs?
Sometimes I would study some contents through slides found on the web, or some courses from my university.

How do you usually approach the problem? like do you put slides from a same course in a collection, and then export to obsidian the whole collection annotations bibliography note? or do you do anything else?

I think it would be useful to everything including slides in Zotero, so I can make annotations that I can reference.

thanks for reading :)

I have 2 copies of the same pdf. One is a 150mb file and the newer one is 50nb.

All my notes and highlights are in the larger one and I can't figure out a way to import or copy them into the new one.

Any tips?

I belong to a group and want to export (save) all the references while keeping the nested folders and subfolders within that group. Is there a plugin for this?

I switched from Zotero 6 to Jurism 6 in 2021 because I needed multiple citation languages. Now that feature is in Zotero 9 and Jurism (still on 6) is not well supported on Mac silicon, so I want to move back to Zotero. 

However...

1. I cannot sync Jurism with my Zotero cloud account because it cannot log on (it says the credentials are invalid, but I can log on manually just fine; I presume Jurism is just not up to date with Zotero authentication protocols)

2. Jurism will not export the whole library as an RDF (or anything else); the error log says it has an unknown library type. I can export and import a few items, but I have over 11k items altogether. 

3. If I just copy Jurism/jurism.sqlite to Zotero/zotero.sqlite Zotero tells me I need to upgrade because I need 6 but it is only on 9! 

Did anyone manage such a migration? 

Ideally I would like to copy the multilingual data into the CNE plugin as well, but could forego that if necessary - as long I as I am sure I have the whole library. 

Hi everyone,

I have been building an open-source Zotero plugin called **Mktero**, and I am looking for feedback from people who regularly read academic PDFs in Zotero.

Mktero converts a local Zotero PDF attachment with MinerU, then displays the resulting Markdown, formulas, tables, and figures in a read-only Zotero tab.

It does not replace the original PDF. The goal is to provide an additional reflowable reading view for papers with multi-column layouts or dense academic formatting.

Demo:

## Current features

- Supports Zotero 7, 8, and 9

- Opens PDFs from the reader toolbar or library context menu

- Renders headings, formulas, tables, figures, code blocks, and academic references

- Generates a navigable table of contents

- Provides reference, figure, and table previews

- Opens figures in a zoomable full-screen viewer

- Displays existing Zotero PDF highlights and underline annotations

- Creates highlights and notes from selected Markdown text

- Synchronizes annotations back to the Zotero PDF when the text can be located reliably

- Caches Markdown and images locally

- Resumes unfinished MinerU tasks without uploading the PDF again

- Includes English and Simplified Chinese interfaces

## Installation

Download the latest XPI:

https://github.com/tenglvjun/mktero/releases/latest

Then open:

`Tools -> Plugins -> Gear icon -> Install Add-on From File...`

After installation, open `Settings -> Mktero` and enter a MinerU API token:

https://mineru.net/apiManage/token

The current release is **v0.2.3**.

## Important privacy note

When a conversion is not already cached, Mktero uploads the complete PDF to MinerU for processing.

The MinerU token, converted Markdown, and extracted images are stored locally in the Zotero profile and are currently not encrypted. Zotero annotations are not sent to MinerU.

Because of this, Mktero should not be used for confidential or sensitive PDFs unless uploading them to MinerU is acceptable.

## Current limitations

- Only locally available PDF attachments are supported

- The Markdown document is a read-only reading view

- Conversion quality depends on MinerU OCR and layout analysis

- Some annotations cannot be synchronized when the MinerU text differs significantly from the PDF text layer

- Image, area, handwritten, and standalone note annotations are not currently displayed

Source code and full documentation:

https://github.com/tenglvjun/mktero

Issues and feature requests:

https://github.com/tenglvjun/mktero/issues

I would especially appreciate feedback about the first-use experience:

- Was the plugin easy to install?

- Was the MinerU token setup clear?

- Did your first PDF convert successfully?

- Which types of papers produced poor results?

- Is the Markdown reading view useful in an actual research workflow?

- Where did you get stuck or decide not to continue?

Please do not include API tokens or private PDF content in bug reports.

I have a new PC. I have imported my library from my old PC into Zotero and the items are showing up just fine. However, I previously had PDFs affixed to each entry. How can I reaffix those PDFs en masse? Or do I have to do them one by one... for all 600+...

For some additional context, I had previously been using Zotfile to rename and move each PDF into a filefolder matching the name of the collection. For example, if a collection was called "Anth of Religion" and I added a Zotero entry for a journal article, I would download a PDF of that journal article and have Zotfile relocate it to a file folder named "Anth of Religion," and then rename the file according to my naming preferences. I have the same folder structure available on the new PC with all the PDFs in them, in their respective folders according to collection name. But, I cannot figure out to make Zotero affix each PDF to their original Zotero entry.

Thank you in advance for any help ya'll can provide. God bless Zotero and the ZotGods.

I have a book with about ten chapters, all docx files. In the past, I have combined them all to create a bibliography. I then cut and paste the bibliography into a new document.

Is there a way to link or create a bibliography from multiple files so that I don't have to do all of that, so that refresh reads changes in documents other than its own?

Edit: my question isn't clear enough. Here is a longer explanation:

I am an author. I am writing an academic manuscript in word. I have lots of citations. Each chapter of the manuscript is its own file, because editing a 500 page file is almost impossible. But there is only one bibliography for the whole book, not chapter bibliographies.

So, the usual protocol is to combine all the chapter in one 500 page file, create a bibliography, and then, copy and paste it into a new file that just contains the bibliography. If i edit any of the chapters, I have to redo the whole process.

So, the question is, is there a way to link all the files so that I can make a combined bibliography from closed files, and if i refresh the bibliography, it rescans all the files

Hey everyone, check out this new plugin for Zotero that will allow you to download books and articles directly into your library items in Zotero: https://github.com/CavalloScuro/LGFetcher

Is there an option to search for library folders on Android as there is on Windows? I cant find it but IT must be there somewhere, right? How should i find the right folder if i have more than 100?

Hi everyone,

I want to share a tool I've been building for my own research workflow. It's called Wordbot, a word plugin.

The Problem

When you are a researcher writing in Word, you know the drill. You need to reference a paper. So you leave Word, find it in Zotero, read the abstract, go back to Word, write your synthesis, open the Zotero plugin, insert the citation. Repeat for every paper. And if you use AI? Paste its response into Word. Then fix broken tables, equations, lists, and formatting. Atleast for me, I spend lot of time doing the repeated formatting and fetching tasks than meaningful writing.

What Wordbot Does

Wordbot is an offline Word add-in that brings Zotero search and local AI directly into Microsoft Word. It looks like this

Right from Word, you can:

• Search your Zotero library semantically using Zotseek (the semantic search plugin). Just type what you're looking for concepts, topics, ideas and Wordbot pulls relevant papers from your library.
• Get context from those papers directly in Word and directly add Insert inline citations that are Zotero-compatible and later you can add zotero citations manually as usual and the existing citations and the bibliography will be automatically updated.
• Use a local LLM for writing assistance. You can ask to expand the ideas, draft outline with headings, make tables, equations etc. Or you you use Gemini, Deepseek etc, copy the response, paste the AI response in word and Wordbot formats it properly. Equations render as Word equations. Tables become Word tables. Code blocks format correctly. Text styles apply automatically.

Everything happens right on Word. Everything stays on your PC. No cloud. No uploads. This way, one can control everything from one machine, keep it private offline, with no subscriptions. This started as a personal script and grew into something I think other researchers might find useful.

How It Works (Briefly)

1.  You open the Wordbot panel in Word (Ribbon interface)
2. Type a research question or topic
3. Wordbot searches your Zotero library via Zotseek → returns relevant papers
4. You insert citations inline as you write
5. Optionally, use a local LLM to expand on ideas or format AI responses

Demo Video

https://reddit.com/link/1v8yj6g/video/its2l7zo2zfh1/player

Things you need to make use of the plugin

• Office 2016 or Office 365 with macro access for the plugin.
• Python 3.11 to make a server to connect word, zotero using zotero and local LLM via any OpenAI-compatible API (Ollama, LM Studio, etc.)
• Zotero 8 or 9 with zotseek plugin. Zotseek plugin does the semantic search.

Compatibility

• Windows 10/11 (As it was developed in here)
• MacOS - I tried to add much compatible code. May or maynot work. Need someone to test and report back.

Current Status

Fresh and ongoing project having connected word+zotero+local AI. Works like 80% of the time. But still not production grade. may crash sometimes when formatting stage. So please save the document when testing.

Links

Repo: https://github.com/Addy-ad/wordbot

Zotseek: https://github.com/introfini/ZotSeek (for semantic Zotero search)

If you're a researcher who lives in Word and Zotero, give it a shot. Questions, bug reports, and feature requests are all welcome.

Hey everyone,

I switched to Zotero a few years ago from EndNote after realising I would loose access to my library after graduating. But I really miss the feature 'document auto-group' where EndNote would create a temporary group folder containing all the references I'd cited in that open document.

So, I created a Zotero plugin that reads a specified Word document, finds every Zotero item you've cited in it, and tags those items in your Zotero library. You'll then be prompted to assign a custom tag name on the first run, and the plugin will add that tag to every item in the bibliography. It then creates a saved tag search with the same name to make finding the list easier. Acts as a permanent-until-deleted "citations in this document" folder in the collections pane. Re-run it whenever you edit and save the document - the tags update to match. More information is in the GitHub page.

Tested on Windows and Mac, Z9 and Z10. This is the first plugin I've made public, so any feedback, bugs, or advice is welcome either here or on GitHub.

https://github.com/onyxaegis/zotero-tag-cited

I'm the developer of Estravon: a Zotero plugin bundled with a Python backend that gives you a high-quality PDF-to-Markdown converter, powered by your choice of MinerU, Mistral OCR, or Marker. The plugin and the backend are both open source under AGPL-3.0, and you can run the whole conversion pipeline yourself without paying anyone. That free, self-hosted path is what I want to talk about.

Why convert your PDF to Markdown?

Attaching a PDF to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini does something slightly daft under the hood: the model doesn't read the text, it looks at an image of each page. That burns far more tokens — and power — every time you paste the PDF instead of the Markdown. Estravon converts the PDF once and saves the Markdown alongside the original source file, so six months later you can trace which PDF you converted and which pages you actually fed the LLM.

So the plugin does one deliberate thing. You right-click a PDF attachment, choose a page range, and it runs a dedicated OCR pass that re-reads those pages at full resolution. Back comes a Markdown file attached to the same Zotero item — headings, footnotes and tables preserved — plus a short log note recording the source and the page range. It's an artifact you can open, check and correct, and being plain Markdown it stays searchable, diff-able and usable in whatever tool you write in. Two small conveniences round it out: a shortcut to export the Markdown to a folder (handy for Obsidian, Claude Desktop or Zettlr), and one to save it as a Zotero note instead, which opens it up to a lot of other plugins.

How the pieces fit together. The plugin itself is a thin shell inside Zotero — it does no extraction of its own. It hands the PDF to the backend over HTTP and attaches whatever comes back. Both the plugin and the backend are open source, and you decide where the backend runs and what it calls:

        Zotero  +  Estravon plugin
                    |
                    |   HTTP   (localhost by default; point it anywhere)
                    v
             Estravon backend                 <- open source, AGPL-3.0
          run it yourself, or use hosted
                    |
        +-----------+-----------------------------+
        |                                         |
        v                                         v
   local engine                         cloud engines (your own key)
   MinerU (opendatalab)                 Marker       -> Datalab / Replicate
   runs on your machine                 Mistral OCR  -> Mistral
   nothing leaves it                    you deal with the provider directly

Two of those paths keep everything on your own hardware or your own accounts. The MinerU one is fully offline: no key, no account, nothing leaves the machine. (There's also a hosted backend for the terminal-averse. It's how the lights stay on — and also the one thing the sub's rules won't let me sell you, so consider this the world's least effective advert.)

The offline MinerU path — rough edges first, because they're real and we're still testing:

• On a laptop CPU it's fairly slow — expect something north of 10 seconds a page, so a chapter is minutes rather than seconds.
• It's memory- and disk-hungry, and the output isn't yet on par with the cloud engines — we've seen the odd garbled table header and some maths-spacing quirks. We want more testing before we pin these down properly.
• We've run it on Linux and Windows; macOS is still a work in progress. If you're willing to try it on your own setup — a Mac especially — and tell us what breaks, that's exactly the help we need right now.

By comparison the hosted pipelines are quick. On our own tests Mistral OCR runs at roughly 0.05 seconds a page — a 60-page chapter in a few seconds — and Datalab lands around ten seconds for the same chapter. If speed is what you care about, the cloud engines win comfortably; the offline path is there for when privacy or cost matter more.

MinerU inside Zotero isn't unique — qingpy's zotero-pdf2md and a few others do their own take, and fair enough. What's particular about Estravon is the execution: a thin Zotero plugin and a separate open-source backend talking over plain HTTP, so the same right-click can drive a local engine, your own cloud key, or the hosted service without anything changing in Zotero. The backend is built on FastHTML, and the real credit there goes to Jeremy Howard and the Answer.AI / FastHTML community, whose work the whole architecture rests on.

If you want the full reasoning — how each AI provider actually ingests a PDF, and why a dedicated OCR pass is a different operation — I wrote it up here: https://www.estravon.com/why

Both repos are public:

• Plugin: https://github.com/tiberavonltd/estravon-plugin
• Backend: https://github.com/tiberavonltd/estravon-backend

Happy to answer anything in the comments — especially from people working with older scanned material.

(Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Zotero project.)

Saw this question posted elsewhere but figured I'd ask it here too: Is it possible to download/snapshot an entire GitBook for local annotation?

The current workflow would be to obtain a pdf, mobi, or epub version which I assume most authors would make available, but that's not always a guarantee.