We made a free/open-source tool that pulls citations straight from your Zotero library into code
Sharing something we built that leans heavily on Zotero, in case it's useful to anyone here.
Some background: part of our work involves ontologies — the big structured vocabularies behind biomedical and knowledge-graph data. Every claim in one is supposed to be backed by a real source, and matching those sources by hand is miserable. So we built Sci2Code, which uses your Zotero library as the source of truth:
- Search your Zotero library from inside VSCode — type "heart", get your matching references instantly
- Insert a proper, DOI-backed citation into the data with one click — author, year, journal, DOI all pulled through
- Flags anything with no DOI and prompts you to add one, so you're not silently citing unverifiable sources
Basically it turns Zotero into the citation backbone for structured data instead of just a bibliography for a paper.
It's free and open source — repo's in the comments so you can see exactly what it does with your library. It's part of a larger ontology editor we're building, but the Zotero piece stands on its own.
Mostly posting to sanity-check the workflow: for those of you who use Zotero as a serious research backbone, does pulling citations out of Zotero into other tools like this match how you work? What would you want it to do?