Zotero API Guide

Overview

Zotero is a free, open-source reference management software designed to help researchers collect, organize, cite, and share bibliographic references. The Zotero Web API provides programmatic access to user and group libraries stored on Zotero servers, enabling integration with research workflows, automated bibliography management, and custom tool development.

The API supports reading and writing items (books, journal articles, conference papers, web pages, and dozens of other item types), organizing items into collections, managing tags, retrieving attachment metadata, and accessing shared group libraries. It follows RESTful conventions and supports JSON and Atom response formats, making it straightforward to integrate with existing research infrastructure.

Researchers, librarians, research software developers, and digital humanities scholars use the Zotero API to build literature review tools, automate citation workflows, synchronize reference libraries across platforms, generate bibliographies programmatically, and create custom research management dashboards. The API is particularly popular in digital humanities projects where large bibliographic datasets need programmatic manipulation.

Authentication

Authentication is optional for reading public libraries but required for accessing private libraries and all write operations. Zotero uses API keys for authentication.

1. Log in to your Zotero account at https://www.zotero.org/
2. Navigate to https://www.zotero.org/settings/keys
3. Create a new API key with appropriate permissions (read/write access to personal or group libraries)
4. Include the key in the Zotero-API-Key header