BibGenie DocsLiterature Search
Find papers in your Zotero library, and know when to switch to OpenAlex for external scholarly discovery.
By default, BibGenie searches and reads your Zotero library first instead of going directly to the public web. This keeps responses grounded in the material you have already collected and organized.
When you need papers beyond your saved Zotero items, use OpenAlex Research. OpenAlex searches public scholarly metadata such as works, authors, venues, institutions, topics, citation counts, and citation relationships. It does not mean the paper is already in your library.
Three Search Modes
Keyword Search
Best when you know a title, author, year, DOI, tag, collection, or other explicit clue.
Semantic Search
Best when you want to describe a research topic, theory, method, or problem in natural language.
List Items
Best for listing candidate papers, paging through results, or inspecting items within a defined scope.
Keyword Search
Keyword search works well when you already know part of the target information:
- Words in the paper title
- Author name
- Year
- DOI
- Collection name
- Tag name
- Journal or conference name
Examples:
Find papers in my Zotero library about contrastive learning.Find causal inference papers after 2022 with the tag review.Keyword search is precise and easy to control. The trade-off is that it may miss relevant papers when your wording does not match the metadata.
Semantic Search
Semantic search is designed for conceptual queries. You do not need to guess the exact terms used in titles or abstracts; describe the research topic instead.
Examples:
Find papers that discuss how large language models affect academic writing norms.My project is about how AI tools change researchers' knowledge work. Find related papers.Semantic search uses a local index of Zotero regular item titles and abstracts. Keep in mind:
- It is not PDF full-text search.
- Papers without abstracts may be harder to match.
- The first run may require time to build the semantic index.
See Semantic Index for index status and troubleshooting.
List Items
List Items is used to display matching papers or continue browsing results.
Example requests:
List the 20 most recent papers in this collection.Show more results.List papers tagged systematic-review and sort them by year.List Items is especially useful when you want BibGenie to show a candidate set first, then decide which PDFs or notes to read next.
Recommended Workflow
Use semantic search to find papers related to a broad topic.
Ask BibGenie to list titles, years, authors, and abstracts.
Select a few papers and add them as context.
Ask BibGenie to read PDFs, compare claims, generate a table, or save a note.
When to Switch to OpenAlex
Use Zotero library search when you want to work with saved items, selected papers, collections, tags, notes, or attached PDFs.
Use OpenAlex when you want to:
- Find papers you have not saved yet.
- Resolve an author, institution, journal, topic, publisher, or funder to a stable OpenAlex ID.
- Explore works that cite a seed paper, works cited by a seed paper, or related works.
- Group public scholarly records by year, source, country, topic, open-access status, or another supported field.
Keep the two result types separate in prompts when needed:
First search my Zotero library for papers about LLM agents, then use OpenAlex to find external papers I may be missing. Keep Zotero results and external OpenAlex results separate.Constrain your search
Add year, tag, collection, or result limits to make searches more useful. For example: "only after 2020", "within the Methods collection", or "return at most 10 papers".