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zotero-agent

Find missing metadata

The problem

Section titled “The problem”

Half your library is missing abstracts, a chunk has no DOI, and some items have no date at all — which breaks sorting, citation, and search. Zotero has no built-in “show me everything missing field X,” and its own empty-field search is unreliable (Zotero doesn’t store an unset field as an empty string, so the obvious search returns zero).

Via an AI agent

Section titled “Via an AI agent”

“Which items in To Read are missing a DOI or an abstract? Fill in the DOIs from Crossref, dry-run first.”

The agent audits the collection, reports the gaps, previews the enrichment, and applies it undoably.

Via the CLI

Section titled “Via the CLI”

Audit first — zot missing uses a reliable getField check, not the empty-string search condition:

Terminal window
zot missing abstract --collection SS5MVVB6   # items with no abstract
zot missing doi                              # library-wide
zot missing date
zot lint                                     # full data-quality report

Then enrich from an external source:

Terminal window
zot enrich --field doi --source crossref --dry-run    # preview
zot enrich --field doi --source crossref              # apply (undoable)
zot enrich --field abstract --source openalex
zot enrich --field date --source crossref

Safety net

Section titled “Safety net”
Terminal window
zot backup
zot enrich --field doi --source crossref --dry-run    # see exactly what would fill
zot enrich --field doi --source crossref              # snapshots first
zot undo last                                          # roll back if a match was wrong

zot enrich snapshots the affected items before writing, so zot undo fully reverses it — useful when an external source returns a wrong match. Scope with --collection and dry-run before running across the whole library.