citation-verifier
installsforks
How to install citation-verifier?
boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier
$npx -y skills add Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills --skill citation-verifierUse when checking manuscript citations, bibliography hygiene, DOI or PMID completeness, placeholder references, or BibTeX consistency before submission or revision.
SKILL.md
| 1 | # Citation Verifier |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ## Overview |
| 4 | |
| 5 | Use this skill when citation integrity is the bottleneck. It is narrower and more operational than general writing skills: the goal is to catch unverifiable references, missing identifiers, duplicated BibTeX keys, placeholder citations, and mismatches between local citation artifacts before they become submission problems. |
| 6 | |
| 7 | Use this skill together with `scientific-writing` or `submission-audit`, not instead of them. |
| 8 | |
| 9 | ## When To Use |
| 10 | |
| 11 | Use this skill when: |
| 12 | - a manuscript is close to submission or resubmission |
| 13 | - the bibliography may contain placeholders, guessed entries, or stale metadata |
| 14 | - a `.bib` file needs a hygiene pass |
| 15 | - the draft mixes DOI, arXiv, PMID, or plain-text references inconsistently |
| 16 | - you need to verify that local citation artifacts are ready before manual or online source verification |
| 17 | |
| 18 | Do not use this skill for: |
| 19 | - generic literature discovery from scratch |
| 20 | - full manuscript restructuring |
| 21 | - venue formatting that does not depend on citation integrity |
| 22 | |
| 23 | ## Local First Pass |
| 24 | |
| 25 | Start with a local citation scan before any online verification. |
| 26 | |
| 27 | The helper script: |
| 28 | |
| 29 | ```bash |
| 30 | python ~/.codex/skills/citation-verifier/scripts/scan_citations.py path/to/file_or_dir [...] |
| 31 | # Claude Code (global install): replace ~/.codex/skills with ~/.claude/skills |
| 32 | # Claude Code (project-local install): replace ~/.codex/skills with .claude/skills |
| 33 | ``` |
| 34 | |
| 35 | Use it to find: |
| 36 | - `[CITATION NEEDED]` or similar placeholders |
| 37 | - `PLACEHOLDER_...` citation keys |
| 38 | - `TODO: verify` markers |
| 39 | - DOI, arXiv, and PMID tokens |
| 40 | - LaTeX `\cite{...}` keys |
| 41 | - duplicate BibTeX keys inside `.bib` files |
| 42 | |
| 43 | Treat imported BibTeX and Google Scholar-style exports as draft metadata, not as verified truth. |
| 44 | |
| 45 | ## Verification Order |
| 46 | |
| 47 | 1. Scan the local draft and bibliography artifacts. |
| 48 | 2. Remove or flag all placeholder citations. |
| 49 | 3. Check BibTeX-key uniqueness and obvious identifier gaps. |
| 50 | 4. Normalize metadata fields that are commonly wrong in copied BibTeX: |
| 51 | - author list and spelling |
| 52 | - year |
| 53 | - venue or journal name |
| 54 | - volume, issue, pages, or article number |
| 55 | - DOI versus preprint identifier |
| 56 | 5. For every citation that matters to a scientific claim, verify the paper exists in trusted sources. |
| 57 | 6. If a claim depends on a specific result, confirm the cited paper actually supports that claim. |
| 58 | 7. Only then finalize formatting for the venue. |
| 59 | |
| 60 | ## Severity Grading |
| 61 | |
| 62 | When you report field-level mismatches, grade each one so authors fix the dangerous ones first: |
| 63 | |
| 64 | - **Critical (must fix)**: wrong or fabricated first author, reversed author order, a DOI that resolves to a different paper, a title whose core terms do not match, or a page range off by five or more. |
| 65 | - **Warning (verify)**: volume-year inconsistent with the DOI-registration year, a missing or extra issue number, a missing middle initial, a page range off by one to four, or an ambiguous publisher-name variant. |
| 66 | - **Info (note only)**: title case versus sentence case, abbreviated versus full journal name, and punctuation or conjunction differences (`and` versus `&`). |
| 67 | |
| 68 | Two checks are easy to miss and worth running explicitly: |
| 69 | - **Volume-year versus DOI-year**: a citation whose stated volume-year differs from the year encoded in the DOI or the online-publication date is a common sign of a miscopied entry. |
| 70 | - **Author-order reversal**: verify the first author specifically, not just that all names are present; a reversed or shifted author list still passes a set-membership check. |
| 71 | |
| 72 | Roll each reference up to one confidence verdict: `verified`, `check_suggested` (has a Warning), `needs_fix` (has a Critical), or `unverifiable` (no source could confirm it). |
| 73 | |
| 74 | ## Trusted Verification Sources |
| 75 | |
| 76 | Prefer this order when moving beyond local scans: |
| 77 | - publisher page or DOI resolver |
| 78 | - PubMed for biomedical papers |
| 79 | - arXiv for preprints |
| 80 | - Crossref or Semantic Scholar for metadata cross-checking |
| 81 | - Google Scholar only as a fallback discovery aid, not as the sole source of truth |
| 82 | |
| 83 | ## Common Failure Modes |
| 84 | |
| 85 | - writing BibTeX from memory |
| 86 | - leaving placeholder citation keys in the draft |
| 87 | - assuming an arXiv preprint and published version are interchangeable |
| 88 | - citing a paper correctly but using it to support a claim it does not make |
| 89 | - letting duplicate BibTeX keys silently overwrite entries |
| 90 | - blindly trusting copied Scholar or BibTeX metadata for venue names, pages, years, or DOI fields |
| 91 | |
| 92 | ## Output Standard |
| 93 | |
| 94 | When using this skill, report: |
| 95 | - placeholder or unverifiable items |
| 96 | - duplicate or suspicious BibTeX keys |
| 97 | - missing or inconsistent DOI/arXiv/PMID information |
| 98 | - suspicious metadata fields that need manual correction |
| 99 | - claims that still need source verification |
| 100 | - the minimum safe next step before submission |
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