Turn Claude into Your Research Assistant with MCP Zotero

Your Zotero library contains years of carefully curated research, but accessing it during AI conversations means constant context switching. MCP Zotero eliminates that friction by connecting Claude Desktop directly to your Zotero cloud library.

Skip the Context Switching Dance

You know the routine: you're deep in a Claude conversation about your research, need to reference a specific paper, then spend five minutes digging through Zotero, copying citations, and pasting context back. MCP Zotero puts your entire research library at Claude's fingertips.

Ask Claude to "find papers about machine learning optimization in my Zotero library" and get instant results with full metadata. No more breaking your flow to hunt down that perfect citation.

Research Workflows That Actually Work

Literature Review Acceleration: Have Claude search your library for papers matching specific themes, then generate summaries or identify research gaps across multiple sources simultaneously.

Smart Citation Management: Instead of manually formatting bibliographies, ask Claude to "create an APA bibliography for these five papers on neural networks" and get properly formatted citations instantly.

Paper Discovery: Find forgotten gems in your library by asking Claude to surface papers related to your current research direction – it can connect dots across your entire collection that you might miss.

Collection Organization: Let Claude help categorize new papers by analyzing their content against your existing collection structure.

Five Tools, Infinite Possibilities

• Search Library: Full-text search across titles, authors, and tags with Claude interpreting your natural language queries
• Get Item Details: Pull complete paper metadata, abstracts, and attachment lists for in-depth analysis
• List Collections: Navigate your organized research structure programmatically
• Create Bibliography: Generate properly formatted citations in any style without leaving the conversation
• Add Items: Let Claude help you add new papers with proper metadata as you discover them

Integration That Just Works

Drop two lines into your Claude Desktop config and you're done:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zotero": {
      "command": "mcp-zotero",
      "env": {
        "ZOTERO_API_KEY": "your-api-key",
        "ZOTERO_USER_ID": "your-user-id"
      }
    }
  }
}

The setup respects Zotero's rate limits and handles authentication seamlessly. Your existing library structure stays intact – this just makes it accessible to Claude.

Whether you're writing papers, conducting literature reviews, or exploring research connections, MCP Zotero transforms Claude from a general AI assistant into a research partner that knows your entire academic context.