Zotero-Summarizer

A tool for creating AI assistants from your Zotero library to help analyze and summarize academic papers. This tool allows you to select PDFs from a Collection and create a customized GPT-4o assistant using the files as its knowledge base. The tool then provides a chat interface for interacting with the assistant, as well as the capability to load or delete existing assistants.

Features

• Connect to your Zotero library and browse collections
• View papers in a collection and check which have available PDFs
• Create AI assistants with selected PDFs and customized instructions
• Load existing assistants you've created previously
• Chat with your assistant about your research papers
• Delete currently loaded assistant
• Toggle between light and dark mode

Requirements and Warnings

Zotero Requirements

• API Access: Requires a Zotero API key with READ access to your library. It cannot make any changes to your library.
• Cloud Storage: Assumes all PDFs are stored in Zotero cloud storage
• Account: You must have a Zotero account with synced collections

OpenAI Requirements

• API Key: Needs an OpenAI API key with full access to the Assistants API
• Permissions: The app will create, load, modify, and delete assistants in your account
• Cost Warning: Using this application will incur charges on your OpenAI account, although the fees should be a few cents or less unless a very large number of documents is used.
  • PDF uploads and vector embedding generation cost money
  • Assistant API calls cost money
  • Costs vary based on PDF size and chat usage

Setup

1. API Keys:

   • Create a Zotero API key with read access
   • Get your OpenAI API key (requires credit card to setup)

2. Environment Setup:

   • Clone this repository
   • Create a .env file in the main directory with the following variables:

     OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key
     ZOTERO_API_KEY=your_zotero_api_key
     ZOTERO_USER_ID=your_zotero_user_id
     PORT=3000
     

   • Install dependencies: npm install

Running the Application

npm start

This will start at HTTPS server at https://localhost:3000

Visit this address in your browser to begin.

Security Notes

• Your API keys are stored only in the local .env file (not committed to git)
• All communication uses HTTPS encryption
• PDFs are temporarily downloaded to your computer before being sent to OpenAI

Limitations

• Only works with PDFs stored in Zotero cloud storage
• Cannot process extremely large PDFs (OpenAI has file size limits)
• Quality of assistant responses depends on OpenAI's underlying models

Created with Claude Code

This application was created using Claude and Claude Code by Anthropic. The intial app was sketched out in a conversation with Claude and the full version was created by Claude Code using $20 of API credits.