Deeptutor – Chat with Your Research Library (zotero Fork)
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
deeptutor.knowhiz.usTechstory
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AI-Powered Research ToolsZoteroAcademic Productivity
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AI-Powered Research Tools
Zotero
Academic Productivity
DeepTutor is a Zotero fork that allows users to chat with their research library, sparking discussion on its potential to enhance research productivity and its limitations.
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Oct 21, 2025 at 9:18 PM EDT
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https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/main/COPYING
(I'm not affiliated with Zotero, though I've enjoyed the advantages of their open source software for research and bibliographic metadata)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...
https://github.com/KnoWhiz/DeepTutor
https://github.com/KnoWhiz/DeepTutorZotero
https://github.com/KnoWhiz/DeepTutorZotero-reader
pyzotero, paperqa.contrib.ZoteroDB,
Paperai supports "Report Schemas" in YAML that could be useful for systematic reviews
IIRC the Zotero Connector doesn't work on students' Chromebooks.
Tabulator was a cool extension. A clone of Tabulator as a Web Extension that has local storage with a remote sync option would be useful.
Zotero does bibliographies with CiteProc and CSL Citation Style Language;
CiteProc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteProc
I'm Logan. Built DeepTutor after running a beta signup last month.
Got 200 researchers in 48 hours. Asked them to screen share their workflow.
What I saw: Copy text from Zotero → paste into ChatGPT → upload PDF to NotebookLM → back to Zotero → repeat.
Everyone was doing this tab circus just to ask questions about their own papers.
So I forked Zotero and embedded the chat directly into the library.
Technical bits: - Built on Zotero's open source codebase - One-click import of existing workspaces - Understands figures/tables, cites exact locations - Agent mode: chat with entire library without manual file selection
Current state: - Some plugin compatibility issues (fixing) - PDF only for now - Paragraph-level highlights (working toward word-level)
Next: MCP integration with Claude Code.
Try it: https://deeptutor.knowhiz.us/
Happy to discuss architecture or product decisions.