Beaver is an AI research assistant for Zotero that helps you search your library, read PDFs, create annotations, and discover new papers from one side panel.
Beaver is an AI research assistant built for Zotero users who want help searching, reading, annotating, and organizing academic papers without leaving their library. It lives as a side panel in Zotero and is designed to work with the paper you are reading as well as the rest of your collection.
The product combines agentic library search, a reading assistant inside the Zotero PDF reader, note editing, and tools for discovering new scholarly work. Its responses are grounded in the documents you provide and supported with sentence-level citations, so it is aimed at research workflows where traceability matters.
Search across author names, titles, journal names, abstracts, and full PDF text using Beaver’s agentic search flow. It can combine metadata search, semantic reference search, hybrid full-document search, and search within specific documents.
Works inside the Zotero PDF reader so you can ask about the open paper, inspect figures and tables, and keep the conversation tied to the page you are reading.
Cites claims sentence by sentence and can open the highlighted PDF passage behind a response, making it easier to verify where an answer came from.
Creates highlights and notes in PDFs, including reviewable annotations such as key findings, comparisons to related studies, and explanations of technical terms.
Helps manage collections, add tags, and fix metadata in your Zotero library, with changes requiring your approval.
Searches beyond your local library to discover scholarly works, with pricing-page tools for external search, batch processing, and AI ranking of search results.
Ask questions about the papers in your Zotero library and get answers drawn from metadata, abstracts, and full-text PDFs.
Read an open paper in Zotero, ask for plain-language explanations of methods, equations, figures, or tables, and keep the conversation anchored to the document.
Add highlights, notes, and comparison annotations directly into PDFs when you want to preserve findings or explain technical passages for later review.
Look beyond your existing library to find related scholarly works and expand a topic area with new references.
Organize an existing Zotero collection by fixing metadata, adding tags, and managing collections with approval-based changes.
Beaver works as a side panel inside Zotero, so it is designed for people who already manage papers in Zotero and want AI help without switching tools.
The source describes Beaver as supporting question answering over your Zotero library, PDF reading and explanation, note creation and editing, library organization, and discovery of new scholarly works.
Beaver is built to stay grounded in your library and the open PDF, and it supports sentence-level citations so you can trace claims back to sources.
The documentation says Beaver supports PDFs up to 800 pages and 75 MB, and it currently works with PDFs; support for additional attachment types is coming soon.
Subscription billing is monthly through Stripe, and you can also use your own API key or buy one-time credit packs if you do not want a subscription.
