Zot Relay

A little help for your research day

More room for
the interesting bits.

Connect your agent to Zotero. You describe a library task; your agent writes and runs the code through Zot Relay.

Install with your agent Source on GitHub

Runs on your computer · MCP connection · MIT licensed

For all those “I’ll come back to this” moments.

Bring your reading notes togetherExample request
Gather my Zotero highlights and comments from “Thesis reading” into a Markdown file, grouped by paper with Zotero links. Leave my library unchanged.
Your agent gathers the annotations and saves the file.

A few things to hand off

Let your agent help with the work around your reading. Use your own collection and tag names in these requests, and ask for a preview when you want to review a change first.

  • For your reading group

    Get ready for journal club

    Add the papers tagged “journal-club” to a “Friday discussion” collection. Keep them in their existing collections.
  • For your literature review

    Find the papers you still need

    Which papers in “Thesis reading” have no PDF attached? List their titles and DOIs without changing anything.
Using Zot Relay Project scope

Let your agent handle setup.

You need Zotero on this computer and an agent with local command access and stdio MCP support. Give it the note below to connect them, then keep Zotero open while you work.

Setup requirements and guidance

Tested with Codex desktop on macOS. Other clients that support stdio MCP can follow the same installation guide; they have not been verified live.

A note for your agent

Install Zot Relay for this agent using https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akshithg/zot-relay/main/INSTALL.md. Verify the connection without changing my Zotero library.

Your agent may need your help with Zotero’s Plugins window or a restart. The installation guide covers setup and verification.