zotero-scholar

What This Skill Does

The zotero-scholar skill serves as a seamless bridge between your research workflow and your reference management system. Designed for researchers, academics, and knowledge workers, this tool automates the process of cataloging academic papers. It takes essential metadata—including titles, authors, URLs, abstracts, and AI-generated insights—and pushes them directly into your Zotero library. By centralizing your research findings, it helps eliminate the manual overhead of data entry, ensuring that every significant paper you encounter is backed up with structured metadata and critical analysis.

Installation

To begin using zotero-scholar, ensure you have the OpenClaw environment initialized. You can install the skill by executing the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gottenzzp/zotero-sholar. Once installed, you must authenticate the skill by setting the ZOTERO_CREDENTIALS environment variable. This should be formatted as userID:apiKey. You can obtain these credentials from your Zotero account settings page. Because the skill utilizes PEP 723 for self-managed dependencies, uv run will automatically handle the installation of the pyzotero library upon first execution.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for rapid literature reviews. If you are browsing ArXiv or other repositories, you can trigger this skill to store papers you find interesting during your research sprint. It is particularly useful for building a 'to-read' list, archiving seminal works for a thesis, or keeping a log of papers discussed during AI-driven analysis sessions. By appending AI-generated summaries directly into the Zotero note field, you can search your library later by specific concepts or findings rather than just by title or author.

Example Prompts

1. "Save the paper 'Attention Is All You Need' by Vaswani et al. from https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 to my Zotero library and tag it as 'transformer, deep-learning'."
2. "Extract the key insights from this research and save them to Zotero, using 'Review-Queue' as a tag."
3. "Store this article in my Zotero collection and include a summary of the core methodology presented in the abstract."

Tips & Limitations

To maximize effectiveness, always ensure your ZOTERO_CREDENTIALS are kept secure and are never hard-coded in scripts that are shared publicly. The tool uses the provided URL as a primary identifier to prevent duplicate entries; however, it is best to verify that your Zotero library sync is enabled so that items appear on your desktop client immediately. Note that this skill is primarily intended for metadata management and PDF linking; complex file handling or bulk library migration may require more manual intervention. Always check your Zotero web interface if you suspect an entry failed to sync due to network latency.