Keep Zotero/Mendeley for collection management; use this simple tool when you just need the formatted references list in five seconds.

Where it helps

- Deep-dive reading – fetch bulk RIS file and dump a seminal paper’s entire bibliography into Zotero/Mendeley and follow the threads.

- Bulk citing – grab BibTeX's for a cluster of related papers without hunting them down one-by-one.

- LLM grounding – feed language models a clean reference list so they stop hallucinating citations.

Did you just use a LLM to write this reply?

Zotero can't extract references from a paper to read later, or at least, I've been using it wrong for years now.

There's a plugin that can do this. It is a little rough around the edges but can extract references from the pdf and search semantic scholar / crossref with decent reliability.

https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference

As a disclaimer, I am not associated with its development.