Import from Library

Connect Your Zotero Collection to BioSkepsis AI

If you've been in research long enough, you know the feeling. Years of carefully collecting and saving papers, organized into collections that reflect your thinking, your research field, your instincts. A Zotero library is like gold for researchers, something that represents not just references, but mindful decisions behind every paper.

And yet, when it came to actually working with that literature, querying it, connecting it, or building on it you were on your own. Your Zotero account stored your reference knowledge, but you couldn't reason over it.

This is exactly why we built Import from Library. We wanted to close the gap between the literature you've already curated and the AI-powered analysis you need, so that your years of careful selection become an active, query able foundation for your next research session, hypothesis, or paper.

Why Does This Matter for Biomedical Researchers?

We understand that researchers do not work from the same starting point. Your Zotero library is uniquely yours and shaped by your field, your methodology, your project history. BioSkepsis AI reads your Zotero collections but never modifies them. It brings your collections directly into the platform, lets you select up to 1,000 papers per session, and automatically expands your imported set with the most recent and relevant literature your field has to offer.

This is particularly valuable for: 

• Principal Investigators (PIs) managing large, multi-topic libraries across ongoing research programs

• Early Career Researchers (ECRs) who want to interrogate the papers they've read during their training and extract deeper insights

• Biotech and pharma researchers who maintain curated topic-specific collections and need to stay current with rapidly evolving fields

• Systematic reviewers who want to import a defined paper set and begin structured analysis immediately

How Does Import from Library Work?

Zotero Integration

BioSkepsis AI connects to your Zotero account. Zotero is one of the most widely used open-source reference managers in academic research, allowing users to save, organize, and annotate scientific papers. Once your Zotero account is linked to BioSkepsis, your collections sync to the platform and are ready to import into any new research session.

Zotero is a trademark of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. BioSkepsis AI is not affiliated with or endorsed by Zotero.

Step-by-Step: What Happens During an Import

Step 1: Connect Your Zotero Account

1. Click on the Import Library tab in your BioSkepsis app

2. If this message appears 'Zotero is not connected yet. Connect it in settings to import papers.' then click on Connect. 

3. To get your API key, go to zotero.org/settings/keys/new and

   1. Add a key name

   2. Enable 'Allow library access' and 'Allow write access'

   3. Scroll down and click on 'Save Key'

   4. Copy the key and paste it in BioSkepsis Zotero API Key field

4. Click Connect to Zotero

Step 2: Add Your Papers

When you open the Import Library tab you can: 

1. Click Browse collections & select papers, you'll see all your Zotero collections listed 

2. Choose a library to import, or click Entire library to import up to 1,000 papers per chat session

3. You can upload the whole library, or browse inside a collection and hand-pick individual papers

Step 3: Unlock AI-Powered Recommendations (Optional)

After selecting your papers, BioSkepsis offers a high-value second step: Discover Related Papers.

1. Click Discover related papers to get up to 100 AI-recommended similar papers

2. Click Select all to automatically retrieve the most recent and contextually relevant publications related to your selection.

3. Then, click the Import papers + recommendations button

This step uses AI to extend your curated collection with literature you may not have encountered yet, ensuring your research session reflects both established knowledge and emerging findings in your field.

Step 4: Import and begin researching

Once you confirm your selection, BioSkepsis imports your papers in a newly automatically created research chat. Your papers will appear in the results panel on the right-side of the screen, clearly labeled by their source collection (e.g. "My Library: 55 papers"), alongside with the AI-recommended papers label as for example "Recommended: 95 papers".

What You Can Do After Import

Once your library is loaded into BioSkepsis AI, you have access to the platform's full research toolkit:

• Smart Select to filter your imported papers by Top Semantic Relevance, Biologically Correlated, or Active Research Frontiers to surface the most strategically useful subset for a given question

• Research Landscape to visualize how your imported papers relate to each other and to the broader field, expand the research landscape, and create a landscape analysis

• Find Foundational Papers to identify the landmark studies that underpin your imported collection, even if they aren't in your Zotero library

• Add papers to Sources in the automatically created chat and ask follow-up questions, request summaries, explore mechanisms, and generate hypotheses grounded in your imported literature

• Export to extract insights, citations, and structured outputs from your session

Import from Library vs. Starting from Scratch: What's the Difference?

When you start a standard BioSkepsis AI literature review session, the platform searches the biomedical literature based on your research question. This works well for open-ended exploration. Import from Library is different. It grounds the session in a predefined, researcher-validated set of papers. This matters when:

• You want AI to reason over a specific body of literature you already trust

• You are building on a previous project and don't want to re-discover the same papers

• You are working within a defined research scope (e.g. a grant-specific literature base)

• You want AI recommendations that are calibrated to your actual field, not a generic topic query

The two modes are complementary. Import from Library gives you a curated starting point; BioSkepsis' AI recommendation layer then expands it with what's new and relevant.

Start Researching with the Literature You Trust

Your reference library represents years of careful, expert selection. Import from Library brings that expertise into BioSkepsis AI so every research session starts from a position of knowledge, not a blank page.

Try Import from Zotero Library on BioSkepsis AI →