Export citations
Items or a whole collection as BibTeX, BibLaTeX, RIS, CSL JSON or a formatted bibliography.
MCP tool zotero_read → export_citations
read
Exports the items you name, or every item of a collection, in the format you choose. For a bibliography, pass a citation style; otherwise Zotero uses its default. The response holds the text and the number of entries, so you can check nothing was cut.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| library string | string | 'me' for My Library (default) or a group library ID from list_libraries. |
| item_keys string[] | string[] | Items to export. Use this or collection_key. |
| collection_key string | string | Collection key from list_collections. |
| format string required | string | One of 'bibtex', 'biblatex', 'ris', 'csljson' or 'bib' (formatted bibliography). |
| style string | string | Citation style for format 'bib', e.g. 'apa'. |
tools/call
{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 1,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"name": "zotero_read",
"arguments": {
"operation": "export_citations",
"arguments": {
"collection_key": "C4T8WZ2N",
"format": "bibtex"
}
}
}
}Example response
{
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "{ ... same JSON as structuredContent ... }"
}
],
"structuredContent": {
"format": "bibtex",
"item_count": 2,
"content": "@article{lee2025sparse,\n title = {Sparse attention for long documents},\n author = {Lee, M. and Okafor, T.},\n year = {2025}\n}\n\n@article{novak2024survey,\n title = {A survey of retrieval for question answering},\n author = {Novak, P.},\n year = {2024}\n}"
},
"isError": false
}