zotero_search_items
Find Zotero library items by title, creator, year, or full text. Choose titleCreatorYear for known references or everything to search inside PDFs and notes.
Instructions
Search for items in your Zotero library. Returns a summary of each match; look up individual results with zotero_item_metadata or zotero_item_fulltext.
Choosing a query mode:
'titleCreatorYear' (the default) searches titles, creator names, and years. Use it for known-item lookup, where you know roughly what the item is called or who wrote it.
'everything' additionally searches abstracts, the Extra field, note text, and the full text of attachments. Use it for topic and full-text search, where the term would not appear in a title.
Words match by prefix, and space-separated words must all be present though not necessarily adjacent, so 'cybor insect' matches 'Cyborg Insect'. A hyphen separates words and switches the match to OR: 'oxygen-deprived' matches anything containing 'oxygen' or 'deprived', which is far broader than intended. Write hyphenated terms with a space to require both halves.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| tag | No | Filter by tag. Use 'foo || bar' to match either tag and '-foo' to exclude one; tag names containing spaces are matched as written. Requiring two tags at once is not expressible here. | |
| limit | No | Maximum number of matches to retrieve. This caps matches rather than items, and several attachments or notes belonging to one work can each match separately, so a search can return fewer items than this number while still having more to fetch. The result header reports the total whenever that happens. | |
| qmode | No | Which fields to search. 'titleCreatorYear' covers titles, creator names, and years; against a local Zotero API it also matches citation keys, which the Zotero Web API does not index. 'everything' adds abstracts, the Extra field, note text, and attachment full text, so use it to find work by what is written inside the PDF rather than in its metadata. A match inside an attachment or note is returned as that child item rather than as its parent, so results routinely contain more entries than distinct works. | titleCreatorYear |
| query | Yes | Text to match. Words match by prefix, and every space-separated word must be present, though not necessarily as a contiguous phrase. A hyphen separates words and ORs them instead, so 'oxygen-deprived' matches items containing either half; write it with a space to require both. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| result | Yes |