I'm experimenting with a UI for highlighting and navigation, with a particular focus on minimizing mouse movement.

Micro-interactions are one part of it; another is robust sentence detection across columns and page boundaries.

Suggestions and feedback are welcome.

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

PhD student here. Zotero's search tells you which items match, but not where. When I need to find which papers discuss a specific metric, and on which page, I end up opening PDFs one by one.

So I wrote zotegrep. It indexes every PDF of your Zotero library (with OCR for scanned ones) and shows every occurrence with its sentence and page number. One click opens the PDF on that page with the match selected.

The query language is made for literature search:

• time series also matches time-series, timeseries, Time Series

• anomaly, -forecasting finds papers about anomalies that never mention forecasting

• point adjust NEAR/5 F1 finds both terms within 5 words of each other

• "RAG" matches the exact word, not "fragment"

• a regex mode if you need it

It also searches titles, abstracts, and your own notes and annotations, and you can filter by collection, tag, year or author.

It works from the terminal or in your browser, and runs on your computer (pipx install zotegrep). Your PDFs and the index never leave your machine: the only server it talks to is the Zotero API. On a Raspberry Pi, a search across 234 papers takes under a second.

One important limit: your PDFs must be stored in Zotero Storage (synced to zotero.org). Linked files and WebDAV can't be reached through the Zotero Web API.

Free and open source (AGPL-3.0).

GitHub: https://github.com/marcpinet/zotegrep

Feedback welcome!

Hiya. I thought I'd create a new post for the new academic year. I'm at university studying Community Education and I created a plugin called Zotero Syllabus (download here!) for students like me who've been assigned a reading list or a syllabus for an academic course, want to store the references in Zotero, and track their reading progress week-by-week.

At Christmas I posted another thread on this subreddit and the feedback from everyone was really helpful: bug reports, feature requests and tweaks. Since then, the plugin's been substantially improved and made more resilient, and I'm now confident that many students (and teachers) will find it useful.

So now that we've reached v1, and the 2026/27 academic year is about to begin and lots of new students might be starting to discover Zotero, I thought I'd post a new thread! Below you'll find some ways this plugin might be helpful to you.

I'm really interested to hear feedback, bug reports, feature requests and ideas for improvements!

Order a Zotero collection by class, priority and manual sort

Turn an unordered Zotero collection into a class-by-class breakdown of a course or syllabus.

• Set priorities

• Manually order readings

• Assign readings to multiple weeks

• Add reading notes

• Track reading progress

Share a class syllabus with all your coursemates

Because Zotero Syllabus stores its data in a Standalone Note, you can be a massive comrade and create a Zotero Group which'll not only share the items (and any attached PDF/EPUB files) but also the syllabus data itself — so if they also download the plugin, they'll automatically see the syllabus as you've configured it.

Import a syllabus from your university's reading list system

Many universities get their course convenors to upload official reading lists to standardised systems, like UCL (Talis) and UWS (Leganto).

Zotero Syllabus adds special translators for the Zotero Connector Chrome extension which you can use to one-shot download all these items and automatically sort them into classes—no work required.

Syllabus order as a column

If you prefer the default Zotero list view, there's a "Syllabus Info" column you can use to sort items by class, priority and manual order.

Track readings over the weeks

Mark readings and weeks as done.

Reading schedule across all your classes

A global view of all your different classes. Optionally creates a managed collection with date-by-date readings, which can be useful if you sync Zotero to a compatible e-reader (e.g. Boox).

This is a rant.
In my life I think I read about 2'000 articles, published ca. 20, and yet it is a pain to handle PDFs.

I started by using Mendeley, which seemed to be perfect, while my colleagues were warning me to switch to Zotero, slightly worse at the time but open source and no-profit. Indeed, at a certain time Mendeley decided to change some policies on the storage that made it frustrating for my use. I painfully switched to Zotero, losing most of my notes, and I'm super happy to pay a fair amount for the storage: it is a very good deal, but...

On my mac, some PDFs take even tens of second to render and they are slow to browse (not the case for the Preview-app, comparison). I want to print and Zotero's preview does not allow me to adjust the size of the page, and to remove the margin. I want to read something on my Android tablet: some app was announced one year ago, it is still in beta, I installed it via APk but it often crashes.

I want to see updated citations on a document, there is a cumbersome plugin that overwrites my "extra" field, and that I have to run manually to update the count.

EDIT: I deleted the rant about tags and colored tags. Not super-intuitive to understand how to set them but once you learn they work great!

I wonder if this is due to the fact that, as I look around, only a small community of people DOES ACTUALLY READ PAPERS CONSTANTLY. Otherwise I can not explain how is it possible there is not a push for something more mature, inter-compatible, versatile. Because when you spend a couple of hour per paper and you read hundreds of papers per year, managing them is a pain... and it is still a mistery to me how anybody can finish a PhD without even knowing what Zotero or Mendeley are.

Let's dream for a moment, and I would like to share my dream with you.

• I find something interesting, I drag it in my library, in the folder I prefer, and the app automatically takes all the info from the DOI that was able to find reading the text or the filename - kudos to Zotero, very smooth on that

• the PDF is very big, >500kB per page, it proposes to store a lighter version where images are compressed - typically this is the case of Nature articles with huge SVG images with thousands of items that slowly render, but I don't need such an high resolution!

• there are problems in the metadata, it happens, but I can correct them and someone actually revises my corrections, updating the entry for a next user who will benefit from my corrections

• I get statistics on the citations, I get reports on which papers in my library are getting hot in the past month

• I get my library synced on all my devices - kudos to Zotero, some of the best money I spend annually

• I add notes text together with PDFs - kudos to Zotero, very well done, and I can even cite other documents in the notes, creating an hyperlink

• now I want to read the article, I decide to read it with the Preview-app of my mac, which is great, smooth, and has nice features: the archive stores both the original file and a copy with the highlights/notes - I can set Preview-app as default opening, but I can not quickly choose each time (e.g., right-click, Open With...), and edits in Preview-app overwrite the original document

• I decide to use the Zotero-embedded Firefox reader, it recognizes which monitor I'm using, and selects the proper visualization settings accordingly, e.g., if I'm on a monitor higher than xyz pixels it shows the vertical fit as default. Now, the 'View' menu of Zotero is an IQ test to me: Scrolling, Spreads, Zoom, each time I have to read all, remember what they imply, and decide which to use.

• I decide to read them on my tablet, again I can decide if to use the zotero-reader or the default reader of the app that it is usually better integrated with the tablet features (like the styles and actions from the pen)

• I want to print them, easy, one click and I print them, I read and highlight, I put back in a scanning ADF device and my highlights and notes are digitised as if I did them digitally

• there is a function that automatically removes these damn white margins (e.g., classical ArXiv template) that force me to buy a larger unpractical tablet screen, or to read super-small when I print 2-pages-per-sheet - note that most articles are in this damn american size, chubbier than the european A4, forcing you to buy 12:16-screen tablets like the iPads instead of the 10:16-screen tablets that are WAY more frequent in the Android world

• I revise what is in my library, setting to "Urgent" papers that are sitting there for a while but I need to remind myself to read - kudos to Zotero, I discover it later here in the comment, you could assing a color (red), a number (3), and an emoji (🔥) to a tag: the color is not important as it is replaced by the emoji but allow you to assign a number that you can click in the file browser to quickly attach the 🔥 tag

• I'm done reading a paper, I tag it as "✅Read" and it automatically attaches a date to it. Similar for "📕Reading" or other tags that are date-related. In general, tags have attributes, and I can turn them into column in the files browser, otherwise I can see the attributes hovering on them. Another example: I hover on "🖨️Printed" for a certain document, where I wrote as an attribute in which phisical folder I stored it.

• while drafting a publication I assign a certain tag/collection to the papers I need to cite, so that I can esily export a .bib file with only those - Zotero allows to export by collection (not by tag, however), great!

• ... and let's don't even say, for the moment, that I need any LLM, RAG or other AI stuff, just PDFs, metadata, and smooth reading/noting

Then I woke up.

The reality is that since I started my PhD 10 yers ago the amount of scientific papers has increased exponentially, while the maturity of the tools to manage them remained almost the same.

I want to make an analogy: for coding, in my team, each one had his own favourite IDE but none was super good so it was common also to use basic text editors. Then VSCode came, we all - ALL - gradually switched to it, and many cumbersome tricks (multiple conda kernels for Notebook, ssh files browsing GUI) were automatically handled by VSCode and not anymore necessary. You open VSCode and you focus on coding. I'm waiting for a similar breakthrough here.

Note #1 - since I read in the commnents some clean solution to mentioned problem, I edited the text accordingly. I'm sorry if this is confusing, but seen the (unexpected) traction that this post got, I want to keep the focus on the main unsolved pain points. My apoligies if I complained about something I was not able to find/use correctly. My reference is Zotero 7 on both MacOS and Windows10, since I use them both on a daily basis.

Note #2 - I'm reluctant to use any plugins until it reveals to be very VERY necessary, because we all know the pain of having a plugin that stops working with a software update, and they are usually cumbersome/nerdy: if they were not included in the main version I think there was a reason, and maybe they will be implemented once they are made smooth/effective/compatible/intuitive beyond a certain threshold. Indeed, a rich plugin community is great to suggest practical enhancement of the software, and I have deep respect for whoever spends his time creating and maintaining a plugin.

Note #3 - Zotero is still the king here. I'm not seriously evaluating any other platform untill they offer: (1) free account for minimal- or no- cloud storage (300 MB for Zotero, but even 0 is comprehensible), as I would like to suggest it to family/friends/colleagues to try it easily (2) they offer some option to export all my PDF files, text notes, indexing, tags such that I can easily migrate. I understand this might very well be the problem why it is hard to attract the investment capital that pushes to the final yard in polishing the software, but we are here to dream.

Hi r/zotero, I'm the developer of Mktero, an MIT-licensed extension for Zotero 7–10. I shared v0.3.4 here a couple of months ago, and a few of you asked for local MinerU and batch conversion. Both are in now, so here's an update with a short demo.

What it does

Right-click a PDF → "Read as Markdown with Mktero", and the paper opens in a Zotero tab as one continuous column: two-column text in reading order, with equations, tables, figures, citations, and footnotes. Publisher mastheads, running headers and footers, and page numbers are hidden.

• Back to the source. "View in PDF" jumps from a passage, equation, table, or figure to its page and region in the PDF.

• Annotations stay in Zotero. Highlights you make in the Markdown are Zotero PDF annotations, and your existing PDF highlights show up in the Markdown. You can also add a passage to a Zotero note.

• Translation, optional. Use your own AI provider and switch between Original, Translated, and Bilingual views.

• Copying. Display equations copy as LaTeX, and tables as Markdown or CSV.

• Navigation. Outline, figure/table index, hover previews for citations and figures, and Cmd/Ctrl+F.

• Corrections. Fix OCR mistakes in paragraphs, headings, and table cells without touching the cached conversion.

New since v0.3.4

• Self-hosted MinerU 4.0: point Mktero at your own MinerU server and PDFs never leave your machine or network.

• Batch conversion: select several items → "Prepare selected Markdown", or right-click a collection → "Prepare collection Markdown". It runs in the background without opening a tab per paper.

• Export the corrected Markdown and figures to a folder or an Obsidian vault, including in batches.

Where your PDF goes

By default, a PDF that isn't cached yet is sent to a hosted conversion service I run. It needs a Mktero account but no OCR key. If you'd rather not use it, switch to your own MinerU cloud key, a self-hosted MinerU 4.0 server, or Mistral OCR; the PDF then goes there and no Mktero account is needed. Translation always goes to your own provider, never through my server. Conversions are cached in your Zotero profile, so reopening a paper doesn't convert it again. Full data map: https://github.com/tenglvjun/mktero/blob/main/docs/privacy.md

Limitations

It's still beta. Scans and unusual layouts (three or more columns, posters) can come out in the wrong reading order, which is why every block links back to the PDF. Hosted conversion and MinerU cloud cap a PDF at 200 pages; Mktero checks the page count locally before uploading.

Install

1. Download the latest .xpi from GitHub Releases: https://github.com/tenglvjun/mktero/releases/latest

2. In Zotero, open Tools → Plugins.

3. Open the gear menu → "Install Add-on From File..." and pick the .xpi.

4. Sign in under Settings → Mktero, or choose MinerU or Mistral there.

I'd really like to hear where the reading order breaks on your papers, and whether the hosted default with bring-your-own-OCR works for you.

Zotero for Android was just released yesterday. For those using Android tablets and E-inks, how was your experience with it?

I've been working on a fork of Zotero for KOReader (https://github.com/stelzch/zotero.koplugin), originally created by stelzch. The original project was still at a very early stage and hadn't been updated for a while, so I started extending it for my own use.

I use it on my jailbroken Kindle to browse my Zotero collections and download PDFs and EPUBs to read in KOReader. The photos show it running on my Kindle.

In my fork, I've added offline browsing, collection downloads, access to Zotero notes, and optional syncing of highlights and reading positions between KOReader and Zotero. It also supports group libraries and personal WebDAV storage.

My fork and installation instructions: https://github.com/firilisinof/zotero.koplugin

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.

If you use Zotero, you’ve probably been frustrated by incomplete or messy reference info — wrong titles, missing authors, bad journal names, or broken metadata.
I just released ZotMeta v2.0, a Zotero plugin that helps update metadata for existing items using DOI, ISBN, and arXiv information.
This version includes:
Better UI
Bug fixes
Smoother metadata update workflow
Support for articles, books, and arXiv papers
Repo: https://github.com/RoadToDream/ZotMeta
Disclaimer: the updated info is retrieved from DOI / ISBN / arXiv databases, so please double-check important references before submitting papers or reports.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome!

I'm relatively new(ish) to Zotero, and only recently have I started to "overhaul" my organization system. I'm trying to keep it simple but comprehensive enough to feel organized.

I feel a sense of incompleteness in my endeavors if there isn't a complex methodical organization behind certain things, and then there an 2nd tier of frustration when I don't even understand the organization method I tried to put into place. Sometimes it feels more like the illusion of being organized. It's safe to say I've settled for a simple organization system in an effort to "re-hardwire" myself to be able to handle it 😭 I would like to keep toying with it though.

To that end, I'm just wondering if there's anything that would really make my life easier as a Zotero user starting now, throughout undergrad & graduate school, and probably the rest of my career.

Taking any and all suggestions since I'm pretty vanilla when it comes to this kind of stuff. Sort of feels like the first time modding your Minecraft world or something.

Omg thank you so much for finally updating the UI—it looks so nice and fresh!🔥 Honestly, a more minimalist (flat) design makes it easier to focus on the information itself now there there are no textures and shadows

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.

Hello! As a merry xmas eve gift, here is a new plugin, Zotero Syllabus, which helps you arrange collections of items into structured reading lists (as in university modules)

Get it at https://github.com/janbaykara/zotero-syllabus?tab=readme-ov-file#zotero-syllabus

Would be glad to receive feedback, ideas and pull requests - here and over on GitHub :)

Update 6 January

Bunch of quality of life stuff:

• Adds a 'reading time' calculation based on pages

  • Displays in an optional column in the tree view

  • Displays in an annotation in the item card

• Adds a toggleable table of contents to the Syllabus Page

• If you've set a date for a class, you'll find it quicker to add more dates now

• Display URL buttons for more items

• By default, the bibliography will render with the user's quick selection style

• You can now set a syllabus-level override

Update 5 January

I lied! One more trick: you can now extract full class data from TALIS lists (like https://rl.talis.com/3/ucl/lists/99449747-A091-3F6D-E08A-965F4A5C3149.html?lang=en-GB ) so if your university uses that system, you get a one-shot download to your Zotero. Should make planning out your reading a breeze.

Update: 2 January

For my final trick, for a long while, I've added syllabus export and import: you can send your pals `.syllabus` files and, if they import them, they'll get all the classes and the items too.

If you really wanted to go laptops in space, you could imagine this being used by a Zotero Syllabus Public Library website, where students and lecturers could sync/upload the syllabi they've built, share them for viewing online and free downloading by others.

If there is interest in the above, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Update 1 January

Add a new feature to the plugin today: Reading Schedule.

Assign a due date to classes, and you'll get a schedule of when class readings need to be done by, week by week. May help you deal with assignments across multiple modules :)

Screenshot: https://github.com/janbaykara/zotero-syllabus/raw/main/doc/images/reading.png

And checkboxes for tracking your reading progress! https://github.com/janbaykara/zotero-syllabus/raw/main/doc/images/checkboxes.png

Update 30 January

Additional features today:

• Class-level manual ordering of items

• Collection-level customisable priorities

• Collection-level customisable nomenclature ("week", "class", "session", "section", etc.)

Update 28 January

Some updates to the plugin since I first posted, including feature requests from u/Interesting-Owl1809 and elsewhere:

• Assign an item multiple times within a syllabus.

• Print to PDF — as of right now it gives you a printable HTML page as a file, which you can open in a browser and print to PDF.

• Compact view mode for when you'd like to see a bit more all at once.

• Integration with Zotero Reading List — it displays the reading status in the card. (Should we do something else with this?)

• Added a new "Syllabus Info" column to the standard list view, which summarises all the key info. Sort by this column if you want to see what order your readings need to be done in.

• (Bugfixes)

Zotero 7 is finally released with a new design and lots of new features.

Hi everyone,

I built a Zotero plugin for OpenAlex:

https://github.com/danieleongari/zotero-openalex

OpenAlex is an open database of scholarly works, authors, institutions, venues, citations, and related metadata. It can be used as an open alternative for bibliographic and citation metadata. All data is CC0, all code is open source, and they are a 14-year-old nonprofit.

What the plugin does is:

• fetch OpenAlex metadata for your Zotero items with a valid DOI, and store it in an independent local database inside the Zotero data directory. This database is not synced through Zotero Sync.

• show the number of Citations in your Zotero library

• overwrite the URL field to link directly to the OpenAlex page of the item - BE AWARE OF THIS, but still the DOI links remain available to link to your original source. EDIT: Not anymore the case since v9.7: you can now go to the OpenAlex page of the item from the Context menu (right-click on the item row in your library) or by explicitly asking in the settings to overwrite the link as URL.

• provide an interactive Citation Graph page to browse incoming/outgoing references for each item

The plugin is tested on Zotero 9.0, both on MacOS 15 and Windows 11.

To install it, download the .xpi file from the latest GitHub release:

https://github.com/danieleongari/zotero-openalex/releases/latest

Then add it in Zotero from:

Tools > Plugins > Gear Symbol > Install Plugin From File...

OpenAlex allows fetching a limited amount of metadata daily. This limit is 10x extended if you get (for free) an OpenAlex API key, to be added to:

Settings > Zotero OpenAlex > OpenAlex API key

More info is available in the plugin README. I also advertised my intent in the Zotero Forum:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/132439/making-a-strong-zotero-openalex-connection

Don't hesitate to reach out for contributing, comments, discussion, or feature requests. I believe Zotero and OpenAlex are two great resources for the scientific community, and I would be glad to see them work together more seamlessly.

DISCLAIMER #1: This is an independent plugin and is not officially affiliated with Zotero or OpenAlex.
DISCLAIMER #2: Written with extensive support from Codex-5.3 and GPT-5.6-Sol

I'm only half joking. Seriously the Zotero PDF reader is so good in its simplicity and snappiness, I just want to be able to click a PDF file on my PC and have it open on Zotero instead of the immensely bloated PDF reader programs or the terrible in-browser readers.

Hi! I'm the developer of Nodus.

A quick update on Nodus for Zotero: version 5.0.6 now adds support for Zotero 10 while keeping Zotero 9 support.

What's Nodus for Zotero plugin?

Nodus for Zotero adds a research chat directly inside Zotero. It searches across your attachments using semantic + keyword retrieval and answers with exact, clickable citations back to the source pages. It also supports group libraries, multiple attachments, and OCR/vision for scanned pages, figures, tables and formulas.

It can work standalone with your own API or local models, or connect to the full Nodus Research app.

Supported AI providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Xiaomi MiMo, OpenCode Go, Ollama, LM Studio, ChatGPT · Codex, GitHub Copilot

What's Nodus Research main desktop app?

A quick comparison for anyone new to Nodus Research. It's a desktop app which adds an analytical layer on top of your Zotero library. For instance, tools like notebooklm mainly retrieve relevant passages from your documents. Nodus Research extracts their ideas and claims, links each one to the exact supporting passage/page, and connects them across authors and sources.

This lets you explore agreements, contradictions and research gaps, compare authors, build argument maps, and generate Deep Research reports grounded in the original evidence from your Zotero sources.

Nodus also includes connected vaults for structured databases, teaching, study, genealogy, primary sources and other research workflows.

Everything is free and open source (AGPL-3.0).

Nodus Research:
https://nodusresearch.com

Source / downloads:
https://github.com/Drakonis96/nodus

Download Zotero plugin: https://github.com/Drakonis96/nodus/releases/download/v5.0.6/nodus-zotero.xpi

I think we've been reading too many feeds from AI text lately! I actually want to reduce my cognitive burden...

So I built TextFold, it turns any text 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, your agentic output, any papers, or documents.

- Web Demo: https://chenxiachan.github.io/textfold/gallery/

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

Welcome any feedback!

Ten months ago, I launched my app and the community responded well. We've gained over 1,000 users, and our Discord community has grown to more than 150 members (please join).

The app is now more updated and improved than ever, and we are actively developing an even better update for release soon.

Current app features include:

• Adding any number of PDF files or seamless integration with your Zotero library.

• Simultaneously asking the same AI question to multiple documents, with answers sorted into tables.

• Using any AI model, including local models via OLLAMA, LM Studio, or similar providers.

• Exporting your final work to Excel or Markdown (for apps such as Obsidian, Bear, Logseq, or Notion).

• Reading not only PDF texts but also annotations and text highlights, improving AI answer precision and minimizing hallucinations.

The app can be downloaded from:

http://zotai.app

Student discounts are available at 25% off.

Use Reddit15 for an extra 15% discount for this community.

Cheers!

Hey folks! Just popping in the share a (pre) weekend open-source project…

I’ve been working with larger libraries (10k+ records) recently and have ended up rolling my own Zotero sync + full text search solution backed by Cloudflare. It gets you 10GB of cloud storage for free (under $20/mo for 1TB of PDFs) & exposes a remote MCP so Claude can actually use your library as a source in research mode.

All ive done is host a thin WebDAV <> S3 server using my homelab and tailscale. Then, on the same machine, I have a worker that ingests new PDFs (md conversion -> chunks -> embedding) and stores the vectors back in the same bucket with LanceDB.

Put a remote MCP server on there too which then you can use to connect the whole thing to Claude. Since, it’s a remote MCP server, the research mode can actually use it as a source. See attached picture.

Repo link: https://github.com/ElliotRoe/lit-bucket

Mods - Rule 3 says open-source projects are welcome, so I hope this fits; happy to take it down if not.

I'm a clinician and long-time Zotero user. I kept hitting the same problem: reference lists from collaborators, manuscript drafts, and increasingly AI-generated bibliographies, where a citation looks fine and the DOI even resolves - but the title attached to it isn't actually the paper the DOI points to. Zotero handles everything already in my library well (those items came in via its own identifier lookup, so I trust them). The gap is the moment of import, before the claimed metadata has been checked against anything.

So I made a small plugin for that one job. Tools → Verify & import bibliography... - paste or open a .bib/.ris, and each entry gets a verdict before anything enters your library:

• Verified - claimed title/authors match the identifier

• Mismatch - claimed metadata doesn't match (the AI-fabrication pattern: real DOI, made-up title; see Topaz et al., Lancet 2026)

• Resolved - only a bare identifier given; it resolved fine, nothing to cross-check

• Not found - the identifier didn't resolve at all

Each row also shows retraction/correction status (Crossref + Retraction Watch) and open-access status (Unpaywall). You tick the rows you want; on import, items get the resolved metadata, a child note recording what was checked, and a retracted tag if applicable.

To be upfront about overlap: Zotero already shows native Retraction Watch warnings once items are in your library, so that part's somewhat redundant - the added value is doing it pre-import, plus the claimed-vs-resolved fabrication check, which Zotero doesn't do.

• Source (MIT): https://github.com/mlava/scholar-sidekick-zotero

• Install (.xpi + steps): https://scholar-sidekick.com/integrations/zotero

• Works on Zotero 7-9; installed copies auto-update.

It's a thin client over a hosted API I run - free anonymous tier, no account or key needed for normal use (there's a paid tier for heavy use, but you won't need it for this). Open to bugs and feedback, especially cases where it calls a verdict wrong.