zotero
Zotero integration for both personal and Group libraries. search items (title/author/tags/year/fulltext/combined queries), create/update/delete items and metadata, add/edit item-level notes, perform bulk operations, and sync attachments (upload PDF or link URL). Trigger when user asks to search their Zotero, add or modify an item/note, upload attachments, or manage group libraries.
Why use this skill?
Automate your academic workflow with the Zotero skill for OpenClaw. Search, update, and manage your research library and group collections effortlessly via API.
Install via CLI (Recommended)
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/rmanluo/zotero-skillWhat This Skill Does
The Zotero skill provides a robust interface for interacting with the Zotero reference management system directly from your OpenClaw environment. By leveraging the Zotero API and the pyzotero wrapper, this skill allows users to treat their academic libraries as programmable databases. It supports comprehensive CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on bibliographic items, metadata management, note-taking, and complex attachment handling. Whether you are managing personal research collections or collaborating via Zotero Group libraries, this skill streamlines the process of fetching sources, updating metadata fields like DOIs or abstracts, and bulk-uploading PDFs. It serves as a central hub for academic automation, ensuring that your research workflow remains synchronized with your AI agent.
Installation
To integrate this skill, use the ClawHub package manager. Run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/rmanluo/zotero-skill. Post-installation, you must authenticate by setting your ZOTERO_API_KEY, ZOTERO_USER_ID, and optionally ZOTERO_GROUP_ID as environment variables. We highly recommend using a .env file or your system's keyring to secure these credentials. For specialized deployments, you may pass these values as command-line arguments to the skill CLI. The bundled install.sh script handles virtual environment setup and dependency resolution, ensuring a seamless experience.
Use Cases
This skill is perfect for researchers, students, and academics who need to automate literature reviews. Use it to automatically ingest PDFs into your library, update incomplete citation data from DOI lookups, or perform mass-tagging of items based on folder contents. It is also ideal for maintaining organization in group settings, allowing for consistent tagging standards across multiple collaborators. By automating the repetitive task of data entry and retrieval, you can focus on synthesizing information rather than managing library metadata.
Example Prompts
- "Search my Zotero library for items tagged with 'machine-learning' published after 2022 and list the titles."
- "Add a new note to the item with ID 'ABC12345' saying: 'Ensure this paper is cited in the literature review section.'"
- "Upload the PDF file located at ~/Downloads/research_paper.pdf to my Zotero Group library 99999 and add the metadata title 'Recent Advances in AI'."
Tips & Limitations
To maintain security, never commit your API keys to version control. The skill handles attachments efficiently, but note that large file uploads may be rate-limited by Zotero’s API. Advanced internal PDF annotations are currently out of scope, focusing instead on high-level item metadata and note-level attachments. Always perform a dry-run when executing bulk deletion operations to avoid accidental data loss. If you encounter connectivity issues, verify your API key permissions, ensuring the 'Read/Write' scope is correctly enabled in the Zotero developer portal.
Metadata
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Find the right skillPaste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.
{
"plugins": {
"official-rmanluo-zotero-skill": {
"enabled": true,
"auto_update": true
}
}
}Tags(AI)
Flags: file-read, file-write, external-api