About / Zotero
The papers you’vealready chosen.
Connect Zotero and the library you’ve already built teaches Curator your field in a single pass — then stays in step as you add to it.
Read-only · Encrypted · Yours to disconnect
New accounts start from nothing: a cold model that needs a few rounds of feedback before the feed finds you.
Zotero skips that. The library you’ve already curated is the most honest record of your field that exists — Curator reads it once, end to end, and starts there.
One connection, read-only.
One click
Curator requests read access to your library and notes. Never write.
Or paste a key
Create a read-only Zotero key and paste it. Curator checks it with Zotero before saving anything.
Either way
Your key is encrypted before it touches our database, and never written to a log.
The import runs in the background. Close the tab; it keeps going. It checkpoints as it goes and resumes where it left off, so a large library finishes across several passes instead of timing out.
- 01
Your library
Every item, plus every group library your key can read. Run it again and nothing duplicates.
- 02
Your highlights
The annotations you left in Zotero’s PDF reader come across too.
- 03
Your feed
Once the library is in, Curator uses it to personalize what you see.
Every item has to become a paper Curator knows. It tries, in order:
- 01
By DOI
10.1038/…Matched against Curator’s corpus.
- 02
Fetched if new
PMID:…A DOI or PubMed ID we don’t have yet is pulled from OpenAlex or PubMed and added. Your library can grow the shared corpus, not just point at it.
- 03
By title and authors
When there’s no identifier to match on.
What can’t be matched is set aside as Unmatched, for you to review or dismiss. Curator never invents a stub paper to cover a gap. A matched item lands in your library as a save — and never overwrites one you saved by hand.
V · Your highlights
Open the paper in Curator’s reader and your Zotero highlights are right where you left them.
Private by construction
Imported highlights live in a table only you can read, with row-level security keyed to your account. They never appear in a like, a reply, a share, or anyone’s network feed.
Yours to build on
Add your own highlights, notes, and freehand ink on top — all private, all in the same reader.
Connect once; it keeps up. Every few hours Curator pulls only what changed since last time — new and changed papers, new highlights, and anything you deleted in Zotero. Nothing re-imports from scratch.
This is the point of all of it. Curator averages the papers in your imported library into a single picture of your interests, and ranks what you see against it.
Cold start, solved
For a new account, your library is the feed. The papers you chose decide the first papers Curator shows you.
It never overwrites you
If Curator has already learned a profile from how you read here, the import won’t replace it. Your earned signal wins.
Only real matches count
Only items that resolved to a paper feed this. Unmatched items sit out.
Read-only
The connection requests read access only. Curator never writes to your Zotero.
Encrypted at rest
Your key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage, and never written to a log.
Yours alone
Your library, your highlights, and your unmatched items are owner-only. No other user, followed or not, can read them.
Reversible
Disconnect and Curator erases your stored key and sync state. Imported papers stay in your library as ordinary saves; the Zotero link is gone.
Without an account
No Zotero account? You can still import a .bib or .ris file, or export your whole Curator Library back out as BibTeX, from your profile settings.