Search & Browse

How Search Works

zot search matches keywords across four layers:

1. Titles & abstracts — direct text match
2. Author names — first and last name matching
3. Tags — exact tag matching
4. PDF fulltext index — Zotero's built-in fulltext index

For deeper content search with BM25 ranking and optional semantic matching, use workspace query.

Basic Search

zot search "transformer attention"

Filter by Collection

zot search "BERT" --collection "NLP"

Filter by Item Type

zot search "protein" --type journalArticle

Common types: journalArticle, conferencePaper, preprint, book, bookSection, thesis

Sort Results

zot search "attention" --sort dateAdded --direction desc
zot search "attention" --sort title --direction asc

Sort fields: dateAdded, dateModified, title, creator

List All Items

zot list --limit 20
zot list --collection "Machine Learning"

Recently Added Items

zot recent                    # Last 7 days (default)
zot recent --days 30          # Last 30 days
zot recent --days 7 --modified  # Recently modified

View Item Details

zot read ABC123

Shows metadata, abstract, and notes. Use --detail full for extra fields.

Find Related Items

zot relate ABC123

Finds items sharing tags, collections, or explicit relations.

Detail Levels

zot --detail minimal search "attention"   # Key, title, authors, year only
zot --detail standard read ABC123         # Default — includes abstract, tags, DOI
zot --detail full read ABC123             # All fields including extra metadata

JSON Output

zot --json search "attention"

All commands support --json for machine-readable output.

Library Statistics

zot stats

Shows total items, PDFs, notes, breakdown by type, collections, and top tags.