relations
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How to use it
relations is exposed by the Zotero MCP MCP server. Add the server to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf and others), and the relations tool becomes available to the model automatically. See the full listing for setup details and every tool this server provides.
Install Zotero MCP
docker run --rm ghcr.io/<owner>/zotero-mcp:latestOther tools in Zotero MCP (39)
Everything (the pre-0.9 behaviour)
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Scan items for retractions and editorial notices
Get Scite citation tallies and retraction alerts for a paper
Search your Zotero library with Scite-enriched results (tallies + alerts inline)
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Add one or more items from BibTeX (inline or .bib file)
Add one or more items from CSL JSON (inline or file)
Add a paper by DOI with automatic metadata and open-access PDF attachment
Add a book by ISBN (Open Library + Google Books cascade)
Add a paper by URL (arXiv, DOI URLs, and general webpages)
Import a local PDF or EPUB file with automatic DOI extraction
Perform complex searches with multiple criteria
Attach a local file or a PDF URL to an existing item by key (no new item created; returns the attachment key; idempotent per filename and content hash)
Create a highlight (text=) or an area annotation (rect=[x, y, width, height])
Get annotations (including direct PDF extraction); use format="json" for normalized records suitable for scripts and other MCP tools
Get items in a collection
List collections
Get attachments and notes for one item or many (pass an array of keys)
Get full text content
Get detailed metadata (supports format="markdown", format="json" for complete raw Zotero metadata, and format="bibtex")
Retrieve notes from your Zotero library; pass query to search note and annotation text instead of listing
Detect figure/table regions on a PDF page (with captions and normalized coordinates) for accurate area annotation placement — its reported bbox can be passed straight to zoterocreateannotation(rect=...)
Get recently added items
Check database status and configuration
List all tags
Create, update, or delete a note via action="create""update""delete" (beta feature)
Search your library using custom tag filters
Search your library by keywords
AI-powered similarity search with embedding models
Set, change, or clear an item's parent (parentkey=null makes it top-level)
Build a per-paper annotation/note digest; supports format="json" for structured grouped output
Manually update the semantic search database