Zotero AI Butler is an open-source plugin for the Zotero reference manager that uses large language models to read the papers in your library and turn them into structured notes. It has 1,822 stars on GitHub and is under active development in 2026. Instead of feeding papers to a chatbot one by one, the butler works through your library automatically.
Once installed, AI Butler watches for new PDFs added to Zotero and sends them to the LLM provider you configure with your own API key. It produces clear Markdown summary notes saved alongside each paper, so the key points, methods, and conclusions are searchable inside Zotero itself. The 5.0 release adds an autonomous agent mode that can search your literature, read papers, and answer research questions with evidence from the collection. The plugin collects no personal data: requests go directly from your device to your chosen model provider. The plugin ships with an English documentation wiki and handles papers in Chinese and English, including scanned, image-only PDFs. Finished notes are written back into Zotero as first-class items, so they sync, search, and cite like the rest of your library.
Zotero AI Butler is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. You only pay your LLM provider for the API calls the plugin makes on your behalf.
It is built for researchers, PhD students, and academics whose Zotero libraries have grown faster than their reading time, and who want AI-digested notes kept inside their existing reference workflow.