Zotero research prompts: literature review, synthesis and screening
Seven MCP Prompts: user-triggered scholarly workflows exposed as slash commands that orchestrate the zotero_* tools for common research tasks.
Zoteus ships MCP Prompts: user-triggered scholarly workflows that hosts expose as slash commands. They orchestrate the zotero_* tools for common research tasks.
| Prompt | Arguments | What it does |
|---|---|---|
zotero-literature-review | topic, collection? | Search + read + synthesize a cited mini-review. |
zotero-cite | item_keys, style? | Format a bibliography for specific items in a style. |
zotero-add-from-url | source, collection? | Ingest a paper from a URL/DOI/ISBN/PMID/arXiv. |
zotero-organize | collection? | Suggest tags and collection moves for loose items. |
zotero-find-related | item_key | Find related & citing work (library + scholarly graph). |
zotero-citation-audit | text | Check a draft's citations against the library/literature. |
zotero-summarize-collection | collection | Summarize a collection's themes and gaps. |
Each prompt returns a templated instruction message that guides the model to use the right tools (e.g. zotero_semantic_search, zotero_get_item, zotero_bibliography). They are read-only by themselves: any writes happen through the tools, with the usual safety gates.
Evidence checks
Use the first-research-task workflow with any deployed version. The current source prompts require passage retrieval before detailed synthesis and distinguish an existing reference from support for a claim. Collection overviews based on abstracts must say so. These revised templates take effect when that source version is installed; hosted releases may lag.
If your client does not expose MCP prompts, paste the workflow from the guide into chat. Annotations to literature notes uses the existing tools and asks you to review a draft before saving.
Quote PDF passages with page numbers from Zotero
Retrieve PDF passages with page locators for grounding, look at PDF pages and figures as images, audit tag hygiene against a controlled vocabulary, and export with Better BibTeX formatting.
Find citing, cited and related papers for any DOI
Explore the wider literature around a paper (its references, citing works, and related papers) and see which ones you already have in your library.