A guide for creating citations and bibliographies from a Zotero library, a tool for managing research references. It supports common styles such as APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, Vancouver, and Nature, plus BibTeX, RIS, and CSL-JSON exports.

Use it to format in-text citations, bibliographies, reference lists, exports for other tools, or Word documents with live Zotero citation fields.

It reduces errors in author names, dates, page ranges, and identifiers by taking formatted references from Zotero. It also keeps the chosen citation style consistent across a document or reference list.

citations — Skill for Claude Code by oscardvs/zoteus

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add oscardvs/zoteus --skill citations

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oscardvs/zoteus

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install zoteus, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oscardvs/zoteus/citations.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 680 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00091	$0.00680
Opus 5.5	$0.00036	$0.00272
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00018	$0.00136
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00068

Measured 1mo ago against content hash f9961a2f616e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

citations scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/zoteus/skills/citations/SKILL.md · 29 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 29 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Citations and bibliographies from the Zotero library

These steps use the Zoteus tools, named zotero_*. Take every formatted reference from a tool. Never type one from memory, because a wrong year, page range or DOI in a reference list is hard for the user to spot.

Find the item keys with zotero_search_items (by title, author or year) or zotero_semantic_search (by topic), and confirm them with the user when there is any doubt.
Resolve the style. When the user names a style, call zotero_styles with action:"resolve" and name set to their wording, for example "APA 7th", "IEEE" or "Chicago author-date", and pass the returned styleId on. Default to APA only when the user has no preference.
Render.
- A bibliography for library items: zotero_bibliography with item_keys and style, which returns XHTML and takes up to 150 items.
- Plain text, RTF, or items that are not in the library: zotero_format_bibliography with item_keys, or with items as CSL-JSON, plus style and format:"text".
- One inline citation: zotero_get_item with include:"citation" and style.
Export for LaTeX or another manager with zotero_export and format set to bibtex, biblatex, ris or csljson, plus item_keys or collection_key. Use better-biblatex only when the user has the Better BibTeX plugin in Zotero and wants its citation keys.

Word documents with live citations

zotero_word_document writes a .docx whose citations are live Zotero fields, which the Zotero Word plugin can refresh and restyle. Write body as paragraphs with placeholders:

[[cite:ITEMKEY]] for one work
[[cite:ITEMKEY,p. 12]] for a work with a locator
[[cite:KEY1;KEY2]] for several works in one citation

Set style. A bibliography field is appended by default. The file is saved under the Zoteus data directory unless you pass save_path, so tell the user where it went. Suggest that they open the first document in Word and use Zotero's Refresh once to confirm the fields behave in their setup.

Read the full file on GitHub · 29 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

1mo ago First seen · 29 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A f9961a2f616e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

citations is a skill published in the GitHub repository oscardvs/zoteus (62 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 680 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-28.

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