Cookbook

Real jobs, done two ways. Each recipe states the problem, then shows how to do it via an AI agent (the prompt to give it) and via the CLI (the exact zot commands), and ends with the safety net — backup, dry-run, undo.

Many of these are things people have asked Zotero for over years of forum threads. zotero-agent does them locally, on your own machine.

Recipes

• Clean 500 items — bulk metadata edits with zot apply + undo.
• Summarize a PDF into a note — read the PDF, write a child note.
• Give a PDF a table of contents — build and embed an outline so Zotero’s reader can navigate it.
• Bulk-tag by topic — classify and tag a whole collection.
• Dedupe and merge — find near-duplicate titles and merge safely.
• Import by identifier — add items by DOI/ISBN/arXiv, with PDFs.
• Find missing metadata — audit gaps, then enrich from Crossref/OpenAlex.

The universal safety net

Before any recipe that writes at scale:

zot backup            # snapshot zotero.sqlite (prints the path)
# disable auto-sync in Zotero -> Preferences -> Sync
zot <write> --dry-run # preview what would change
zot undo last         # roll back the last apply/enrich (merges excepted)