citation-verifier

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Use when checking manuscript citations, bibliography hygiene, DOI or PMID completeness, placeholder references, or BibTeX consistency before submission or revision.

5installs

Sourceboom5426/nature-paper-skills

Added on2026-05-17

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add boom5426/nature-paper-skills citation-verifier

SKILL.md Content

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Citation Verifier

Overview

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.

Use this skill together with

scientific-writing

or

submission-audit

, not instead of them.

When To Use

Use this skill when:

a manuscript is close to submission or resubmission
the bibliography may contain placeholders, guessed entries, or stale metadata
a
```
.bib
```
file needs a hygiene pass
the draft mixes DOI, arXiv, PMID, or plain-text references inconsistently
you need to verify that local citation artifacts are ready before manual or online source verification

Do not use this skill for:

generic literature discovery from scratch
full manuscript restructuring
venue formatting that does not depend on citation integrity

Local First Pass

Start with a local citation scan before any online verification.

The helper script:

bash

python ~/.codex/skills/citation-verifier/scripts/scan_citations.py path/to/file_or_dir [...]
# Claude Code (global install): replace ~/.codex/skills with ~/.claude/skills
# Claude Code (project-local install): replace ~/.codex/skills with .claude/skills

Use it to find:

```
[CITATION NEEDED]
```
or similar placeholders
```
PLACEHOLDER_...
```
citation keys
```
TODO: verify
```
markers
DOI, arXiv, and PMID tokens
LaTeX
```
\cite{...}
```
keys
duplicate BibTeX keys inside
```
.bib
```
files

Treat imported BibTeX and Google Scholar-style exports as draft metadata, not as verified truth.

Verification Order

Scan the local draft and bibliography artifacts.
Remove or flag all placeholder citations.
Check BibTeX-key uniqueness and obvious identifier gaps.
Normalize metadata fields that are commonly wrong in copied BibTeX:
- author list and spelling
- year
- venue or journal name
- volume, issue, pages, or article number
- DOI versus preprint identifier
For every citation that matters to a scientific claim, verify the paper exists in trusted sources.
If a claim depends on a specific result, confirm the cited paper actually supports that claim.
Only then finalize formatting for the venue.

Trusted Verification Sources

Prefer this order when moving beyond local scans:

publisher page or DOI resolver
PubMed for biomedical papers
arXiv for preprints
Crossref or Semantic Scholar for metadata cross-checking
Google Scholar only as a fallback discovery aid, not as the sole source of truth

Common Failure Modes

writing BibTeX from memory
leaving placeholder citation keys in the draft
assuming an arXiv preprint and published version are interchangeable
citing a paper correctly but using it to support a claim it does not make
letting duplicate BibTeX keys silently overwrite entries
blindly trusting copied Scholar or BibTeX metadata for venue names, pages, years, or DOI fields

Output Standard

When using this skill, report:

placeholder or unverifiable items
duplicate or suspicious BibTeX keys
missing or inconsistent DOI/arXiv/PMID information
suspicious metadata fields that need manual correction
claims that still need source verification
the minimum safe next step before submission