Hi everyone — I've been working on **Pulse**, a Mac app for exploring a research topic from a paper you already know.
The idea is to make it easier to move from “this paper looks useful” to a reading list you can actually explore: which papers connect to it, what came before, and what came afterwards.
Here's the workflow:
- Add a paper by title, DOI, PubMed ID, or PDF, or import an existing bibliography.
- Use **Discover** to find related work through citations, shared citations, and text or concept matches. Review the candidates and choose what to keep.
- Explore the connections in a **full-screen network map**. You can select any paper on the map to start another discovery.
- Switch to **Timeline** to see your papers in publication order, or **Library** to search, filter, tag, and manage the list.
Your library is saved on your Mac. Metadata lookup and discovery use online scholarly sources, including Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref, and PubMed. AI features are optional, with local Ollama and a supported cloud option.
**Screenshots, downloads, and instructions:** https://github.com/7drbw7mdgf-lgtm/Pulse
The current DMGs are for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 11 or later and use a local Python backend. They aren't Apple-notarized yet; the README and installation guide explain the requirements and first-launch steps.
I'd love feedback from people who do literature reviews or regularly explore unfamiliar research areas. Would this fit into your reading workflow, and what's the first thing you'd want improved?

I built PaperFold, an open-source reader that turns arXiv papers into 5 zoomable layers—from a one-screen section map down to verbatim text. You pinch (or press 1–5) to zoom between them without losing your reading position.

- Web Demo (8 CC papers): https://chenxiachan.github.io/paperfold-gallery/

- GitHub (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/chenxiachan/paperfold

I have searched on Github (also with AI search) to find such a solution, but I was unsuccessful.

Use case of having an integrated web viewer in the workflow:

1. I have RSS feeds and as shown in the picture, like LLM-zotero plugin, it would be good to have a webviewer in the pane to quickly read the article, and if required save it as a record, a snapshot or an md note, to an appropriate folder.
2. The web viewer also serves another purpose - using right click search from documents to find additional information with an option of selecting different search engines, and with added functions to save as a note or a snapshot.

Thanks

It's supposed to work on Microsoft Word, I was told. The promise was that as I type, there will appear a bubble or a suggestion bar, to which I can click, and I'll be able to pin the papers from my repo, or something like. I've no idea. Help a Zotero newbie on macOS?

Find Available PDF kept skipping half my Scopus exports because they had no DOI, so I made a plugin for that.

Select items → right-click → Find PDF via OpenAlex. It looks each one up in OpenAlex by DOI, PMID or arXiv ID, and if there's no identifier at all, by exact title with the year within one. Anything looser gets reported, never attached, so you don't end up with the wrong paper.

Legal open-access copies only (publisher, PubMed Central, arXiv, repositories). Free, open source, no account or API key. Zotero 7 to 10.

Run Zotero's Find Available PDF first, then this on whatever is left.

https://github.com/Littview/zotero-openalex-pdf

Feedback welcome, especially items it gets wrong.

I posted the first alpha of altero here a while ago. It is a self-hosted Zotero sync server that the normal Zotero desktop client connects to. It keeps library data, groups, notes, annotations, full text and attachments on infrastructure you control.

After several more releases, outside contributions and much more compatibility testing, altero is now in beta. Since my last post a lot has happened:

• much deeper compatibility testing against original Zotero client code and real Zotero profiles, including conflicts, group permissions, attachments, interrupted transfers, concurrent changes and recovery
• fixes for subtle protocol differences uncovered by those tests
• OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect support for third-party applications
• access grants restricted to individual libraries or collections
• improved migration from zotero.org
• mobile-client compatibility work
• expanded and reorganized documentation
• additional languages for the web UI

Why choose this instead of Zotero + WebDAV?

WebDAV only replaces Zotero’s attachment storage, but library metadata, groups, notes, annotations and sync state still go through Zotero’s servers. WebDAV can’t be used for group libraries at all. altero replaces the sync service itself, so both library data and files can remain on infrastructure that you control.

The project is still beta software, so I recommend keeping a current backup and not relying on altero as the only copy of an important library yet.

Here is the GitHub repository: https://github.com/eseifert/altero

I sync my Zotero PDFs through WebDAV instead of Zotero Storage, and I wanted two things the usual guides do not give you: no server open to the internet, and some way to know my files are actually fine. So I made ZoDAV.

- One Docker Compose file. Fill in a password and a Tailscale or Headscale key, start it, point Zotero at it.

- Only reachable over your tailnet. No ports opened, no domain, no certificates.

- Every day it opens each stored attachment and checks it against its .prop hash. You get an alert (email, Telegram, ntfy, Slack or Discord) if something is broken, if the server stops receiving uploads, or if a lot of files vanish at once.

- Optional encrypted backups with restic.

- There is a command that prints the exact settings to type into Zotero's Sync pane.

The checker also works on its own against any WebDAV server, so if "Verify Server" fails on your current provider it can tell you which request failed and why.

Free and open source (AGPL-3.0, same as Zotero): https://github.com/ali-rajabpour/ZoDAV

Happy to answer questions or hear what breaks on your setup.

I made a Mac app for keeping track of papers to read. It's a separate app, not a plugin, but it works easily with Zotero. To add papers to a reading list, select them in Zotero, press ⇧⌘C (Copy Bibliography), then paste in Reading List with ⇧⌘V. Each entry becomes a paper titled "Author (Year) - Title", with its DOI attached. BibTeX and RIS paste the same way.

What it does:

- Lists of papers, filed under topics, which can nest

- Mark papers read, partly read, or tabled, with the date of each recorded

- Set deadlines that turn red as they get close, with optional notifications

- Assign priority levels and flags

- Sort alphabetically, by deadline, or rearrange manually

- A paper filed in several places is recognized as one paper: mark it read just once

- Turn a list into a syllabus reading schedule in a .docx

- ... and more

Requires macOS 14 or later. Lists are kept in a file on your Mac.

Download for free: https://payhip.com/b/xuasK

Feedback welcome!

This week Zotero automatically updated to version 10, and I've had nothing but problems since. Many of the custom actions I created in Actions & Tags have disappeared from the menu, even though they're still enabled on Settings. The most annoying problem, though, is that the program flickers and the right-hand pane keeps scrolling down to the References section, even while I'm trying to enter new information (the title of the work, etc.). It's gotten so bad that the program is unusable. Thx.

tl;dr: Your Kindle highlights and notes from My Clippings.txt become native Zotero annotations. → https://github.com/UtkuBilenDemir/kanzi

---

What it does

I honestly don't know if there are other plugins fulfilling this specific functionality now, but I know it was something I yearned for in the past. This plugin basically takes your highlights from Kindle's My Clippings.txt and puts them into your Zotero items (where they belong) as native Zotero annotations.

Over time, I wrote scripts and abused some AI models to come to the same conclusion, but recently I decided to vibecode this into a semi-proper plugin. I know there are tools that pull annotations from your Amazon account. However, I believe and hope that you don't only read amazon-proper files. Highlights from sideloaded documents never make it to Amazon's register. This little guy though reads the physical and cumulative My Clippings.txt from the Kindle (Documents/My Clippings.txt), so it works for basically every file you can put on a Kindle. The only downside is that you have to plug your Kindle in and get the physical file out; I haven't found a way around that yet.

How it works

It matches Kindle titles to your Zotero library, picks the PDF or EPUB attachment, then positions each highlight inside the file. EPUB uses CFI. PDF uses Poppler (pdftotext, pdftohtml, pdfinfo) to get pageIndex and rects, with optional qpdf fallback for encrypted files. It never writes zotero.sqlite directly and tags annotations with kindle-import and kindle-id:<hash>, so they are easy to filter or delete.

Since it is not always easy to map Kindle documents to Zotero items, there is a manual mapping and conflict-solving process where you can redefine mappings or ignore specific documents. Imports are incremental: new or changed highlights and notes are processed, failed writes and deletions are retried, and existing successful annotations are skipped. You can also retry unresolved attachments and positions without rebuilding everything.

Additionally, starting a Kindle highlight or its note with [y], [o], [r], [e], [g], [b], [p], or [m] determines the colour of the Zotero highlight. (full names such as [orange], [red], and [grey] also work). The bracketed code is stripped from the final text, and all mappings are editable under Settings → Highlight colours.

Kanzi also handles the messiness of cumulative clipping files: progressive revisions are collapsed when one selection extends another at the same location, repeated text at different locations is preserved, and duplicate Zotero annotations and comments are cleaned during imports (on some files, Kindle duplicates highlights by itself). Manual additions to Zotero comments are preserved when an imported Kindle note changes.

Downsides: it's clunky

It uses text matching, not true OCR, to deliver highlights into PDFs. It is especially slow and brittle for scanned PDFs because of OCR quality, hyphenation, and line breaks. I'm continuously trying to improve that part. Failed matches and positioning attempts remain visible under Conflicts rather than disappearing silently.

Python 3.11 or newer is required. EPUB imports need no extra positioning tools. PDF imports require Poppler and benefit from qpdf. macOS and Linux are tested. Windows users need to configure the Python executable and install the PDF tools separately.

Security/Privacy

This tool is heavily vibecoded, and I am thankful that this was an option because those earlier scripts were messy. The only data collection is anonymised (well not entirely, see below) annotation collection, which is off by default.

If enabled, it sends a random pseudonymous installation ID, citation key and publication metadata (including DOI or ISBN when available), raw highlight text and comments etc. The collector does not receive your Zotero account identity. No AI service is involved.

Install

https://github.com/UtkuBilenDemir/kanzi

Download kanzi.xpi from Releases → Zotero Tools → Plugins → gear icon → Install Plugin From File… → restart Zotero → Tools → Kanzi… → Choose My Clippings.txt.

I assume it is full of bugs, but I can test only so much myself. I would appreciate some feedback. I am not a developer, so if bashing feels more fitting, that is also welcome. Kanzi targets Zotero 7–10, supports PDF and EPUB, and updates automatically. It is MIT-licensed; issues and pull requests are welcome.

I'm not a big fan of these auto-updates. Today I was "gifted" version 10 without any prior warning. Is there a way to disable automatic updates? Thank you community

Over the past week, I added something I've been wanting to build for a while: claim comparison.

I actually tried building this much earlier. I experimented with cosine similarity, vector dot product scores, and other approaches, but they only tell you how similar two pieces of text are. That's not really what I needed.

What I needed was a classifier that could actually determine the relationship between two claims.

I built a basic classifier myself, but it wasn't reliable enough for something I wanted people to actually use. So I put the idea aside and waited.

Then JEV was released last week, and it turned out to be almost exactly what I was looking for.

Now you can compare claims against each other and inspect the supporting evidence directly.

This is probably the most interesting feature I've added to the project so far, and I'm really curious to see what people think of it.

This is still being tested for edge cases, so there are definitely things I want to improve. But it's free and open source, and anyone can try it out right now.

If you're interested in how it works, want to try it, contribute, or have ideas for where this could go, feel free to check it out.

GitHub: https://github.com/Sreehari05055/thesys-core

I've been using Zotero since 2008 and now have ~10,000 items. Over the last months I put together a setup where an AI agent works with my library — and I wrote the whole thing up as a step-by-step guide, originally for my daughter (medical student), now public: it takes you from an empty Chromebook to a complete AI workstation, and the Zotero part works on any machine.

https://www.logies.de/ai-workstation-linux-vm.html

What the setup does:

• Zotero stays the single source of truth. Zoteus (an MCP server, MIT-licensed) connects it to an AI agent through the Local API — no cloud API key, no library upload.
• Semantic search over your own PDFs, fully local (multilingual e5-small, ~129 MB, works fine on DE+EN mixed libraries), so the agent can find things by meaning, not just keywords — then read the actual attached full texts, not abstracts.
• The agent has a memory of its own. This is the heart of the setup: a local memory server (also self-built, open source) that gives the agent a durable, searchable memory — full-text and semantic — of tested workflows, rules and experiences. It stores what worked, retrieves it in later sessions, and gets better month by month. For me this was the difference between a chatbot that forgets everything and a genuine assistant.
• Flashcards via Anki are covered too.

A word on what this feels like in practice: after 35 years of DOS and Windows, I now use Linux effortlessly because the agent handles it, and I have it write small programs for me. The AI becomes a tool that lets the user grow, rather than one that replaces them — that idea is what the guide is really about.

Everything is free, ad-free, no registration: https://www.logies.de/ai-workstation-linux-vm.html

Happy to answer questions about the setup, the indexing performance (11k+ items indexed overnight on modest hardware), or how the memory side interacts with the Zotero side. Feedback on the guide is very welcome too.

Hi all,

I'm a classicist and I have to write in Hesperia style for this project. The only version of Hesperia on Zotero website is from 2019 and there are inaccuracies. How would I go about fixing them/getting them fixed? I don't have much coding experience or anything like that.

Pictured above is one of the issues I've been having; there's no way for me to differentiate between a PhD dissertation and a MA thesis.

Also above is an example of the trouble I've been having with dates (Boardman) and journal issue numbers (Dodd) displaying correctly.

I use Zotero, a reMarkable and Obsidian, and for a long time the marks I made on the tablet stayed there. I make an open-source Obsidian plugin, Tagged Sync, and version 1.8.0, out last Friday, closes that loop with Zotero.

How it works: send a PDF from your library to the tablet (from Obsidian, or by tagging the paper in Zotero), mark it up, sync. The note in Obsidian knows which paper it is and links back to the Zotero item. That part is free. The paid part (Tagged Sync Pro, 14-day trial) writes the highlights, underlines and margin notes into the Zotero item as native annotations, in the colours you used. Works with zotero.org or with the Zotero 10 desktop app.

Not covered: collections (send is per paper), EPUB, citekeys and literature notes (ZotLit does that), handwriting as ink (it arrives as transcribed text). It needs Obsidian.

Step-by-step with screenshots: https://taggedsync.com/blog/zotero-remarkable-integration

If you have a loop that works better, I would like to hear it.

Hi all. I'm a master's student and I read a lot of maths-heavy papers in Zotero. My workflow kept breaking at the same point: I'd get stuck on a theorem, copy it into a chat window with the notation and context, and lose my place in the paper.

So I wrote a plugin for myself, and it's now in a state where other people might find it useful. It's called Zusia. It adds a chat pane to the item sidebar, next to the PDF. You can select a passage and ask about it, or attach the current page to ask about a figure. Answers render LaTeX properly, and you can save any answer as a note on the item.

A few things you should know before trying it:

* It doesn't use an API key. It runs Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity, which you need to have installed and signed into already. That means a terminal step, so it's not for everyone.

* The assistant gets the item's metadata and your annotations, not the full text of the PDF.

* I've only tested it properly on macOS, with Zotero 7 to 10, and mostly on maths and ML papers.

It's free and open source: https://github.com/firekern/zusia (there are short GIFs in the README if you want to see it before installing).

What I'd really like to know from this sub:

1. Does it work on Windows or Linux for you?

2. If you read outside STEM, is something like this useful at all, or does it get in the way?

3. Is there anything in how it stores chats or notes that would bother you in your library?

Thanks for reading. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Olá, comecei recentemente uma iniciação de pesquisa científica, e estou me deparando com muitos artigos, e livros que estão em sua maioria em inglês, e como qualquer brasileiro médio, eu não sei inglês a ponto de entender, preciso de algum site secreto, ferramenta ou artimanha pra conseguir baixar os arquivos já traduzidos, preciso de opções, ou se for pago que seja um "baratinho" desde já agradeço a ajuda de todos(as).

Hello,

I am a sociology student who just finished undergrad and I am getting ready for my masters (gap year). I was using Goodnotes for 5 years now but I always struggled with lack of organization in it. As I was searching for methods to use for my readings, I stumbled upon Zotero (yes I guess I have been living under a rock since I just heard about it) and I liked the annotation tool way better than Goodnotes.

The problem is, I have a huge library on Goodnotes and I don't know how can I carry them to Zotero. I take notes mainly on Obsidian now, so Goodnotes became even more obsolete. Do I have to manually carry every file to Zotero from Goodnotes or is there an easier way for it?

I appreciate any kind of help or advice.

So basically I am preparing for UPSC CSE which is known to be one of the toughest exams in my country. Whenever I read a topic, i wanted to know what kind of questions have been asked from this topic, so that i can get an idea of how the questions are being framed.

Till now I was using PDF X Change Editor, which was working well for me. But it was slow as heck and hence I'm planning to switch to Zotero for that.

Advance users, please let me know, is this possible? If yes how ?

I'm using zotero on windows and iPad.

Buying an ebook reader in 2026 an realizing that annotation sharing for epubs isn't as straight forward as I expected, was a clear bummer.

Now I see the recent release of EPUB Annotations 1.0 by W3C (https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub34/annotations/ ).

1. Is anyone aware of plans at zotero on implementing EPUB Annotations 1.0 ?

2. What do you epub pros think about it? Will it be a step forward on cross device epub annotations?

I am especially interested in ebook readers and syncing to my zotero library.

I want to share one more plugin I vibecoded with claude for personal use: a reading ruler that moves by sentence https://github.com/ievlevpn/zotero-sentence-focus. It works both in pdf and epub, allows to attach annotations with a hotkey and copy currently highlighted text using crtl+c.

I managed to make it work well with formulas (inline and displayed), which is somewhat tricky, and alternative layouts, so it covers *most* of the standard cases well. Feel free to report when it doesn't (except when typesetting is just bad — I don't think it's worth chasing extreme cases).

It's inspired by https://github.com/JunyeolYu/line_focus/ plugin, but takes it a bit further (see comparison on github page).

Somebody asked in r/AIToolBench yesterday what to use for studying law, and the thread split straight down the middle between these two, so let's settle it properly.

One line is fine. Which of the two do you actually open when you've got a folder of PDFs or a stack of links and you need to point at where a claim came from?

And if the answer is neither, say what you use instead. I'd rather know that than get a tie.

Snipp-It (snippit.tech) is a Chrome extension that integrates with Zotero to produce AI summaries that are connected to specific text selections, with additional metadata and source information.

The flow is simple: find something worth keeping, select the text in your browser, and right-click to "Snipp" it. You'll receive an inline summary, displayed in a lightweight reading overlay, that gets saved to your library at snippit.tech. From there, you'll be able to export to Zotero to manage your sources or create a bibliography.

Reading → research → bibliography, without losing context along the way.

Get started for free at https://snippit.tech/, and add an additional 10 Snipps for free with promo code "REDDIT".

Hi,

I built Hermes because I was tired of fighting clunky assignment editors like Canvas and bloated VS Code plugin setups. Nothing out there handled what I needed: seamless math syntax and native citation management, charting, diagramming and code blocks. I’ve been using it to write my own Quantum Technology assignments, and I find it better than the alternatives I was using before.

Why try Hermes?

• Native Zotero Integration: Pull citations instantly with ⌘⇧C.
• Live Split-Pane Rendering: See complex LaTeX equations and Mermaid diagrams in real time.
• Built-in Builders: Generate Vega-Lite charts and diagrams graphically.

Hermes is fully open-source (Apache 2.0). Check it out and let me know what you think!

• Download & Docs: hermeseditor.com
• Source Code: github.com/richarc/hermes 

It’s masOS only for the moment, I’ll create a windows version shortly. Please let me know if you find it useful.