PapersGPT

PapersGPT is an AI research assistant inside Zotero for researchers working through a paper library. It helps answer questions across saved research and turn findings into notes with citations back to the papers.

• Library questions and comparisons: Ask about a single PDF or your whole library, compare methods and results across papers, and save the synthesis as a draft or Zotero note.
• Source citations: Follow citations in AI answers directly to the referenced papers to check the evidence.
• AutoPilot: Give it research questions and it reads a collection, extracting hypotheses, methods and findings into structured Zotero Notes using local or cloud models.
• Literature Radar: Discover and track papers through arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar and other research databases, with digests inside Zotero. This feature needs internet access and sends queries directly to those services.
• MCP access: Connect your Zotero library to clients such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor for paper search and retrieval.

The plugin runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. PDF parsing, indexing and search happen locally. With a local LLM, PDFs, questions and answers stay on your computer, and analysis works offline. It supports built-in models including Qwen, Gemma and Mistral, plus Ollama and custom OpenAI-compatible APIs. Cloud choices include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek; those requests use external services.

PapersGPT is open source under AGPL-3.0, with paid licenses and private deployments available.