Zotero is my go-to tool for managing academic papers. It’s open-source with a fantastic ecosystem around it, and over time my library has grown into a useful personal knowledge base. When Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol late last year, I saw an opportunity in giving AI assistants direct access pull items from my Zotero library.

zotero-mcp is a small Python server that implements MCP for Zotero. The scope is intentionally narrow with just three tools: search your library, get an item’s metadata, and retrieve the full text of an item. The idea is that an assistant like Claude can chain these together naturally, searching for relevant papers and then pulling up the details it needs.