ZotSeek | AI-Powered Semantic Search & MCP Server for Zotero

Find similar papers by meaning, not just keywords. 100% local, no data leaves your machine. Now with a built-in MCP server for AI agents.

Status: ✅ Stable release · Zotero 8 & 9 · Transformers.js running locally

New: 🤖 MCP server built in — Claude Code, Codex, and any MCP client can search your library and cite papers with links that open straight to the matched PDF page. Fully local, read-only, opt-in. Set it up in one line →

Features

• 🔒 100% Local - No data sent to cloud, works completely offline
• 🧠 True Semantic Search - Find papers by meaning, not just keywords
• 🤖 AI Agent Access (MCP) - Let Claude Code and other MCP clients search your library, fully local and opt-in (docs)
• 🔍 Find Similar Documents - Right-click any paper → discover related research
• 📖 Search from PDF Selection - Select text while reading → right-click → find documents about that concept
• 🔎 Natural Language Search - Search with queries like "machine learning in healthcare"
• 🔀 Multi-Query Search - Combine up to 4 queries with AND/OR logic to find topic intersections
• 🔗 Hybrid Search - Combines AI + keyword search for best results
• ⚡ Lightning Fast - Searches complete in <100ms
• 📑 Section-Aware - See which section matched (Abstract, Methods, Results)
• 📄 Matched-Passage Preview - Hover a result to read the exact passage that matched, with query terms highlighted
• 📍 Passage-Level Location - Jump to exact page & paragraph in Full Document mode
• ✅ Multi-Select in Results - Select multiple search results, right-click to add to collections
• 📁 Save Results as Collection - One click saves the full result set into a new Zotero collection so you can revisit the list later without re-running the search
• 🔄 Auto-Index - Automatically index new papers when you add them to your library
• 🗑️ Auto-Cleanup - Embeddings automatically removed when items are deleted or trashed
• 🚫 Tag-Based Exclusion - Tag items with zotseek-exclude to skip them during indexing
• 📊 Indexing Status Column - "ZotSeek" column in the item list shows whether each paper is fully indexed, partially indexed (chunk limit hit), out of date, excluded, or not indexed
• ⏸️ Pause & Cancel - Pause or cancel long-running indexing operations at any time
• 💾 Crash-Resilient - Checkpoint saving every 10 items, auto-resume on next startup if a bulk run was interrupted, worker recovery on sleep/wake, skips problematic chunks automatically
• 🔌 Plugin API - Other Zotero plugins can call ZotSeek's search programmatically
• ⚙️ Configurable - Customize via Zotero Settings → ZotSeek (also accessible from search dialog)
• 🌐 Localized - UI available in English and Chinese (zh-CN)

Privacy & Security

ZotSeek is designed with privacy as a core principle:

What this means:

• Your research never leaves your machine
• No cloud services, no API keys, no subscriptions
• No telemetry or usage tracking
• Uninstalling the plugin removes all ZotSeek data

More Screenshots