Guide to Jasminum for retrieving CNKI Chinese academic metadata in Zotero
Jasminum is a Zotero plugin with over 7,000 GitHub stars, specifically designed to enhance Zotero's capabilities for working with Chinese academic literature. Named after the jasmine flower, the plugin bridges the gap between Zotero's predominantly Western academic database integrations and the vast Chinese academic ecosystem centered around CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure).
Chinese academic databases like CNKI, Wanfang, and CQVIP contain millions of papers, theses, and conference proceedings that are often poorly indexed by Western reference management tools. When researchers add PDFs from these sources to Zotero, the metadata is frequently incomplete, incorrectly encoded, or entirely missing. Jasminum solves this by providing direct metadata retrieval from CNKI, automatic filename parsing for Chinese PDFs, and proper handling of Chinese author names and institutional affiliations.
For researchers who work with both Chinese and English academic literature, or for any scholar studying China-related topics across social sciences, humanities, or STEM fields, Jasminum is an indispensable addition to Zotero. It ensures that Chinese-language references receive the same quality of bibliographic management as their English counterparts.
Install Jasminum through the Zotero add-on system:
.xpi file from https://github.com/l0o0/jasminum/releases.xpi file and restart ZoteroPost-installation configuration:
Additional recommended settings:
CNKI Metadata Retrieval: The flagship feature of Jasminum. Select one or more items in your Zotero library that were imported from Chinese databases, right-click, and choose "Retrieve CNKI Metadata." The plugin searches CNKI for matching entries and populates all available bibliographic fields including title, authors, abstract, keywords, journal name, volume, issue, pages, and DOI.
Chinese PDF Filename Parsing: Chinese academic PDFs often have filenames that encode bibliographic information in specific formats (e.g., title_author_journal_year.pdf). Jasminum can parse these filenames and create properly structured Zotero items automatically, saving significant manual data entry.
Author Name Handling: Chinese personal names follow different conventions than Western names. Jasminum correctly handles:
Bookmark and TOC Integration: For Chinese theses and book chapters imported as PDFs, Jasminum can extract table-of-contents bookmarks and structure them as Zotero note attachments, improving navigation of long documents.
Batch Processing: Process an entire collection of Chinese academic PDFs at once. Jasminum will attempt to retrieve metadata for all items, report successes and failures, and allow you to review and correct matches before applying metadata updates.
CNKI Citation Export: Export citations in formats compatible with Chinese academic submission requirements, including the GB/T 7714 citation standard used by Chinese journals.
Importing Chinese Literature:
Managing Bilingual Collections:
lang:zh, lang:en) for filteringWriting with Chinese References:
Thesis and Dissertation Work:
Common Issues and Solutions: