Citable Zotero Research Assistant

A Zotero plugin where every AI answer traces back to a page in the paper

Problem

Researchers manage papers in Zotero, but when they hand papers to a general AI the answers sound convincing yet give no clue which paper or page they came from, forcing a manual PDF check that wastes time. Zotero itself has no AI capability.

Solution

A sidebar plugin running natively inside Zotero: ask questions about selected papers and every answer fragment is forced to carry the source page and highlight, with one click jumping back to that spot in the PDF. Supports citation tracing and excerpt collection across multiple papers.

Users

PhD students, researchers and literature-review writers who live in Zotero

MVP

In-Zotero sidebar Q&A; answer fragments bound to page numbers and text highlights; click to jump to the PDF location; multi-paper scoped Q&A; excerpt export with citations

Revenue

Plugin subscription with a free quota of questions; institutional bulk licensing

Why now

Literature management plus AI has just proven willingness to pay, and a plugin for one tool avoids competing with general chatbots while offering a concentrated, reachable user base