What is zotero-skimread?

SkimRead is a plugin for Zotero, a popular research and reference management tool. It adds AI-powered skimming highlights to documents you read inside Zotero, working with both PDFs and EPUB files. Instead of summarizing sentence by sentence, it reads the whole document and picks out the sentences that best capture the goal, method, results, and novelty of the work, then displays those sentences as colored overlays on top of the text. The plugin is built to handle long documents and books. When something is too long to fit in the AI model's memory at once, SkimRead splits it into parts that follow chapter and section boundaries. You can pause and resume the process at any time, and any highlights found so far stay on screen while you take a break. It also pays attention to the structure of academic papers, skipping over references and using section roles to guide which sentences get highlighted. By default, SkimRead runs locally using Ollama or another local server, meaning your document text never leaves your computer. If you prefer, you can connect it to cloud services like OpenAI or Anthropic, but only after explicitly agreeing to send data off your machine. The plugin keeps results in a local cache, so reopening a document you have already processed is quick. Highlights are temporary by default, but you can save them as standard Zotero annotations that persist and work with Zotero's note-building features. Using it is straightforward: open a PDF or EPUB in Zotero, find the SkimRead panel in the right sidebar, and press Generate. A status line tracks progress and reports how many highlights were found. You can adjust the density and color strength of highlights, switch between preset label categories like Goal or Method, or let the plugin auto-discover labels that adapt to the type of document you are reading. A TL,DR option also produces a short summary of the paper. The full README is longer than what was shown.