It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.

When the Zotero Connector extension[8] is installed in a compatible web browser, a special icon appears in the browser toolbar when a catalog entry or a resource (book, article, thesis) is being viewed on any of a wide variety of websites (such as library catalogues or databases like PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and publishers' websites).

Such functionality is made possible by 'translators' – short pieces of computer code, or scripts[9] to understand the structure of web pages and to parse them into citations using its internal formats.

Furthermore, all entries including bibliographic information and user-created rich-text memos of the selected articles can be summarized into an HTML report.

Questions and issues raised in the forums are answered quickly, with users and developers suggesting solutions.

[20][21] Juris-M is a fork of Zotero with additional features supporting legal research and multilingual citations.

It was created by Frank Bennett, an associate professor of comparative law at Nagoya University, who continues to maintain it.

The storage subscriptions of individuals and institutions, which allow cloud syncing of attached files in users' libraries, fund Zotero's development and services.

Zotero has won awards from PC Magazine, Northwestern University's CiteFest competition, and the American Political Science Association.

[33] The journal Nature editorialized that "the virtues of interoperability and easy data sharing among researchers are worth restating.

Imagine if Microsoft Word or Excel files could be opened and saved only in these proprietary formats, for example.

[45] In October 2018, automatic PDF file retrieval, until then limited to directly saving from original web sources, was expanded to include open-access PDF files available at Unpaywall,[46] and integration with word processors was extended to include Google Docs through the Firefox and Chrome connectors.

[48] In March 2022, with the release of version 6.0, Zotero added an integrated PDF viewer and annotation functionality, in addition to a new note editor.

[51] The upgrade of Zotero also improved performance and compatibility with different operating systems, including native support for Apple Silicon Macs.

In August 2023, EPUB and HTML readers with annotation tools were added to the desktop app in the Zotero 7 beta.

The major app redesign comprises new annotations capabilities, a dark mode, a redesigned item pane with collapsible vertical sections and side navigation bar, and two viewing density options, compact and comfortable, along with the new app icon.