Everything the hosted version can't do — because your library is right there.
A local MCP server foryour Zotero desktop app.Free. Open source.
A native app that speaks MCP directly to Zotero 7 running on your machine. It unlocks the things the Zotero Web API simply can't reach: your full PDF library without file-sync quotas, page-level figures and equations for multimodal AI, live PDF annotations, the item you have selected right now, and Better BibTeX citation keys.
Download
Requires Zotero 7 running locally with the built-in local API enabled (Settings → Advanced). Signed builds will be published to GitHub Releases.
01. See the page, not just the text
Rasterizes any PDF page to an image on demand so multimodal models can read figures, tables, equations, and handwritten annotations. The Web API is text-only and can't do this.
02. Your whole PDF library, no quota
Streams full-text and attachment bytes from the local Zotero store. No Zotero file-sync subscription needed — a 50 GB library works the same as a 500 MB one.
03. "Summarize what I'm looking at"
Reads the item you have selected in the Zotero UI right now, plus every highlight and note on its PDF. Works whether or not your annotations have been synced to zotero.org.
04. Better BibTeX aware
If you use Better BibTeX, tools return your real citation keys — the same ones you cite with in LaTeX, Pandoc, Obsidian, or Quarto — so AI-drafted prose is paste-ready.
05. No rate limits, no round-trip
Talks to 127.0.0.1 instead of api.zotero.org. No Web API throttling on large scans, and it keeps working on a plane, in a SCIF, or behind a locked-down campus network.
06. Yours to audit and fork
MIT-licensed, no account, no telemetry, no server in the middle. Read the source, pin a build, or self-compile. The only network traffic is your AI client calling its own model.
Which MCP clients can reach it
Any MCP client that runs on your machine can connect directly to the local endpoint the app prints on launch — no OAuth, no tokens, no tunnel:
- Desktop apps: Claude Desktop, ChatGPT desktop (developer mode), Cursor, VS Code (Copilot / Continue / Cline), Zed, Open WebUI.
- CLIs: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and anything else that speaks stdio or local HTTP MCP.
Browser-based chat like chatgpt.com or claude.ai runs in the cloud, so it can't reach 127.0.0.1 on your machine — for those, use the hosted version at refbridgemcp.com (or expose the desktop endpoint over a tunnel like Cloudflare Tunnel or ngrok, at your own risk).
Source & license
RefBridgeMCP Desktop is being prepared for public release. The repository will be published on GitHub alongside the first signed build.
Planned license: MIT — use it, modify it, ship it, keep the copyright notice.
github.com/personailized/zotero-mcp-desktop
Not public yet. Star notifications will go out when it opens.