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 & 10 · 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 →

New from the same author: 🔎 citefact — audit your manuscript against your Zotero library: citations exist, quotes are verbatim, claims are supported.

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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
• 📝 Your Notes, Searched Too - Optionally index the text of notes attached to an item, so what you wrote is findable alongside the paper itself; off by default, and existing items are back-filled on demand
• 🕘 Recent Searches - The search window remembers your last 10 queries, so you can go back to a phrasing that worked; clear the list from the dropdown at any time
• 🔗 Hybrid Search - Combines AI and keyword search, with the keyword half reading PDF text and note content, not just titles and tags
• ⚡ Lightning Fast - Searches complete in <100ms
• 📑 Section-Aware - See where each match came from (Abstract, Methods, Results, or one of your notes)
• 📄 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
• 🧩 Selectable Embedding Models - Choose from 4 curated local models, including multilingual options; non-bundled models download once from Hugging Face to your machine
• 🖥️ Local Inference Server (optional) - Serve the embedding model from LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp or vLLM on the same machine for native GPU speed: OpenAI-compatible API, localhost only
• 🔄 Auto-Index - Automatically index new papers when you add them to your library
• 👥 Group Libraries (opt-in) - Extend indexing and search to your Zotero group libraries with the Index scope setting
• 🗑️ 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