Add item by identifier
Add papers or books to My Library from DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, arXiv IDs or ADS Bibcodes.
MCP tool zotero_write → add_item_by_identifier
write
Looks up each identifier the way Add Item by Identifier does in the Zotero app and adds one item per match, into the collection you name. Identifiers Zotero cannot resolve come back in not_found and add nothing. It writes to your own library only and runs without asking first: nobody else sees the items and you can remove them in Zotero with Move Item(s) to Trash….
Parameters
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| identifiers string[] required | string[] | DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, arXiv IDs or ADS Bibcodes. |
| collection_key string | string | Put the new items in this collection. |
tools/call
{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 1,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"name": "zotero_write",
"arguments": {
"operation": "add_item_by_identifier",
"arguments": {
"identifiers": [
"10.1234/example.2026.001",
"10.1234/example.2026.002",
"10.9999/broken.2026.7"
],
"collection_key": "C4T8WZ2N"
}
}
}
}Example response
{
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "{ ... same JSON as structuredContent ... }"
}
],
"structuredContent": {
"requested": 3,
"created": [
{
"item_key": "H6R2VB5D",
"title": "Sparse attention for long documents",
"identifier": "10.1234/example.2026.001"
},
{
"item_key": "N9Q4XA7E",
"title": "A survey of retrieval for question answering",
"identifier": "10.1234/example.2026.002"
}
],
"not_found": [
"10.9999/broken.2026.7"
],
"collection_key": "C4T8WZ2N"
},
"isError": false
}