PapersGPT is an AI-powered plugin by which you can interact with personal PDFs in Zotero, you can now ask questions, and PapersGPT will provide you with precise, reliable answers. This plugin is designed to improve reading and understanding PDF files efficiency with the smartest AI models, such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or DeepSeek. The main features are as below.
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool that helps you collect, manage, read, annotate, cite and share literature. Using Zotero will make your academic productivity soar.It's easy to chat your documents without leaving Zotero, the experience is great.
There are 6 quick buttons:Summary ,Topic ,Background ,Innovations ,Challenges ,Outlook.
You can also type your questions into the dialog box, then click the 'paper aeroplane' button on the right to get the answers. Here are some examples of what you can ask:
"What's the main argument in this research paper?"
"Can you explain the steps in this process?"
"Summarize the main points in this essay."
You can also ask questions that not related to your paper, the plugin will give the answers base on the knowledge of the LLM. Ask questions you like and see what the plugin will reply.
This feature makes reading papers easier and more efficient. Ask a question, and Papersgpt will use AI to pick up the answer from all of your selected documents. You can receive the answer from the documents you select. This feature help you to transform your files into your personal knowledge base.
With the PapersGPT, it is very easy to select and change the LLM model they prefer, such as Gemini, Claude, Grok 4 or DeepSeek, not only GPT. Besides these official models, we have integrated OpenRouter in which there are almost all the SOTA business models, and just one key to access all the models on it. It's very easy to access to all the best popular LLM models without complicated configuration as other AI plugin, just select the model and input the API key, that's all. And online LLMs will be continuously updated.
There are Gemma 3, Phi 4, Qwen 3, Mistral, the distilled open source models by DeepSeek and Llama3.2 available for chatting pdf in Zotero. And local LLMs will be continuously updated.
When use local LLMs, you don't need to purchase the API-KEY.
Just one click running local totaly free SOTA LLMs on Windows and Mac. These models can be automatically downloaded, installed and used with just one click on the plugin page, models are all locally stored, ensuring not sending your data to remote LLMs.
Chat PDF with local LLMs is not affected even when there is no network. Chat with local LLMs offline. For example on the airplane. PapersGPT will provide local LLMs for you.
If you have already intalled ollama on your computer,you can also use the existed ollama.
