Zotero + Consensus AI
Sync your Zotero library to Consensus AI to ask questions about papers you've saved, and find and fill in gaps in your collections.
Consensus (https://consensus.app/) calls itself an AI search engine for academic research. Its responses are grounded in >200 million peer reviewed papers, and if you’re in medicine, you can further limit searches to a subset of top-tier medical research papers and journals.
Our own library at UVA has a really nice guide on using Consensus, and if you’re at UVA you already have a free pro/enterprise license if you log in with your UVA email.
Zotero + Consensus
You can upload papers to Consensus and ask questions about them, but I’m not sure why I’d do that over using Claude or Chat. But today, the Consensus team released a beta version of Zotero integration. You can watch the recording of the release here. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for — something to chat with my entire collection, a subcollection, and find gaps in my library and knowledge.
Once you create a token on your Zotero account, you can give that key to Consensus and it’ll sync over your entire Zotero library.
After that import I can see my Zotero library mirrored to Consensus.
What can you do with this now?
Now from here I can do all kinds of interesting things like ask questions about a particular paper, a selection of papers, a subcollection (i.e. folder in Zotero), or of my entire library.
This is all interesting and super useful, and hopefully you can try this on your own soon. But the demonstration today showed off something far more interesting.
Research timelines
If you’ve been reading this newsletter lately, you’ll know I’ve been writing a bit about AI and biosecurity lately. It’s something I’m interested in, and I’m building up a research program in this here at UVA.
I gave it a small collection of papers in AIxBio (as noted further below, preprints aren’t supported yet, those are coming next month). I asked it for a timeline, and gaps in my library.
And it proceeds to do so. The graphic it produces is interactive — if I hover over a point I can click into the paper.
Finding gaps
Then it obliges and points out where the gaps are in my library. The screenshot below shows a small portion of the response.
Filling in the gaps
This was the killer use case. Now that it’s identified the gaps, help me fill in those gaps!
Here’s a selection of some of the responses.
Gap: Empirical evaluation of biological foundation models / BDTs
Gap: Real-world performance and failure modes of safeguards
Gap: Al-enabled biosurveillance, outbreak detection, attribution
Gap: Evaluation metrics and benchmarks specific to biosecurity
What’s next
As of writing this today, this is only pulling in journal articles. Everyone in today’s event was asking for other types (book chapters, preprints, reports, etc.) and it sounds like the Consensus team is going to make that their #1 priority. Also, for now, group libraries aren’t supported, but they will be very soon.
It sounds like they’re going to start suggesting recommended papers. You can already do this with Zotero+Inciteful, and Semantic Scholar (I wrote about this below).
I’ve only used this for a few minutes. It’s the AI-for-science tool I actually want, not some half-baked thing Big Frontier Lab throws out this week that no one asked for.
Consensus: https://consensus.app/
UVA guide and free pro license info: https://guides.lib.virginia.edu/consensus
Here’s the full video.