Research Paper Management with Notion and Zotero
Managing academic research often involves juggling multiple tools — Word Documents, Apple Notes, and/or Notion for writing notes, Google Scholar for reading papers, and coding notebooks for running analysis and experiments. If you’ve ever wished all these tools could just talk to each other — so your notes, paper reviews, and tasks live in one place — this blog post is for you. In this blog post, I will walk through connecting Zotero with Notion, so you can build a workflow that could save time and help you organize papers more clearly.
To connect Zotero and Notion, we use a third-party package called Notero. It would automatically sync the references that are added to Zotero into a structured Notion database. More specifically, it pulls the metadata for an article in Zotero, such as title, authors, year, journal name, and your notes. It’s also important to note that Notero cannot generate citations by itself without Zotero. It simply syncs citation data into Notion.
Motivation
Zotero is useful for storing papers and creating citations, while Notion offers a versatile page layout with a data table feature that can store notes, track progress, tag readings by keywords, filter by research topics, link related papers, and more. By connecting Zotero and Notion, you can manage and export references in Zotero, while your notes and ideas can live in a database that’s interactive, searchable, and tailored to your design.
Overview of the Workflow
Setting up the Workflow
1. Download Notion and create an account if you don’t already have one.
2. Download Zotero and set up an account if you don’t already have one. You can also set up Zotero Connector, which can allow you to save papers from your browser.
3. Navigate to the Notero GitHub Repo and download the latest release of the .xpi file (you can also do this by directly clicking this link).
4. In Zotero, navigate to Tools in the menu bar, and then go to Plugins. A new window would pop up, showing the Plugins Manager. You can drag the .xpi file into the window, or alternatively, you can click on the gear symbol on the top right corner of the page, then click on Install Plugin From File.
5. Configure the Notero preferences by going to Settings → Notero on the left of the pop-up window. Click Connect to Notion, and go through configuring the workspace you want to connect with, and grant access to Notero to access and edit your workspace. In the last step, copy the key from Notion (that should look like “key=…”). Paste the key back on the pop-up window in Zotero, and the connection will be set.
6. When the connection is established, when you right-click on an article in Zotero, there will be an option to Sync to Notion. The default page that Zotero syncs to is called Notero Basic, which you can modify to better serve your needs. You could create different databases in Notion to contain paper citations in different topics. In that case, the database title would appear in the dropdown menu next to Database, and you could choose the database to sync to. When you first established the connection, you could manually choose papers from Zotero to sync to Notion, or you could sync many papers at once.
7. You can configure the columns to include the data fields that you are interested in by clicking the “…” on the top right corner of the table. Mine looks something like this:
8. Additionally, if you have a new Notion database, say if you start a new research project and want to take other notes, you can have Notero sync to another Notion dataset by clicking the “…” on the top right corner of the Notion page, scrolling down to “Connections”, and searching for “Notero”. This would grant Notero access to write to your new database.
9. Congrats! Now you can smoothly sync the paper details from Zotero to Notion, and you can write and organize your reading notes from here.
References
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Everett, A. (2022, August 22). A technical guide to setting up Notero (Zotero + Notion plugin). Medium. https://medium.com/@anna-everett/a-technical-guide-to-setting-up-notero-...
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David Hoff-Vanoni. (2025). Notero. GitHub. Retrieved Oct 29, 2025, from https://github.com/dvanoni/notero