citation-verification

Files (9)

• SKILL.md
• README.md · references/
• api-usage.md · references/
• common-errors.md · references/
• verification-rules.md · references/
• README.md · scripts/
• api-clients.py · scripts/
• format-checker.py · scripts/
• verify-citations.py · scripts/

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Citation Verification Reference Guide

A reference guide for citation verification in academic paper writing, providing verification principles and best practices.

**Core Principle**: Proactively verify every citation during the writing process using programmatic or canonical scholarly sources first: arXiv, DOI/CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, publisher landing pages, and Zotero metadata. Google Scholar is useful for manual discovery, but it is not the canonical verification authority.

## Core Problems

Citation issues in academic papers seriously impact research integrity:

1. **Fake citations** - Citing non-existent papers (common issue with AI-generated citations)
2. **Incorrect information** - Mismatched authors, titles, years, etc.
3. **Inconsistent formatting** - Mixed citation formats
4. **Missing citations** - Referenced but uncited work

These issues can lead to:
- Paper rejection or retraction
- Damage to academic reputation
- Reviewers questioning research rigor

**Special risk with AI-assisted writing**: AI-generated citations have approximately 40% error rate; every citation must be verified via WebSearch.

## Verification Principles

This skill provides verification principles based on canonical scholarly metadata and claim-level checking:

### 1. Proactive Verification (Verify During Writing)

**Core idea**: Verify immediately when adding a citation, rather than checking after writing is complete.

- Search for the paper via WebSearch each time a citation is needed
- Confirm the paper exists on Google Scholar
- Add to bibliography only after verification passes

### 2. Canonical Metadata Verification

Preferred authority order:
1. DOI / publisher landing page
2. arXiv ID or arXiv landing page
3. CrossRef
4. Semantic Scholar
5. Zotero metadata imported from a verified identifier
6. Google Scholar only for manual discovery or fallback lookup

**Verification steps**:
1. Find a DOI, arXiv ID, publisher URL, or verified Zotero item.
2. Confirm title, first author, year, venue, and identifier.
3. Fetch BibTeX from CrossRef, arXiv, publisher metadata, Zotero, or another programmatic source when possible.
4. If only Google Scholar can find the item, mark it as manual verification and do not treat the BibTeX as final until metadata is checked elsewhere.

### 3. Information Matching Verification

**Information that must match**:
- Title (minor differences allowed, e.g., capitalization)
- Authors (at least the first author must match)
- Year (±1 year difference allowed, considering preprints)
- Publication venue (conference/journal name)

### 4. Claim Verification

**Key principle**: When citing a specific claim, you must confirm the claim actually appears in the paper.

- Use WebSearch to access the paper PDF
- Search for relevant keywords
- Confirm the accuracy of the claim
- Record the section/page where the claim appears

## Verification Workflow

### Integration into Writing Process

```
Need a citation during writing
    ↓
Find DOI / arXiv ID / publisher page / verified Zotero item
    ↓
Verify metadata with CrossRef / arXiv / Semantic Scholar / publisher / Zotero
    ↓
Confirm paper details
    ↓
Get BibTeX
    ↓
(If citing a specific claim) Verify the claim
    ↓
Add to bibliography
```

**Key point**: Verification is part of the writing process, not a separate post-processing step.

## Usage Guide

### Using with ml-paper-writing

The verification principles of this skill are integrated into the Citation Workflow of the `ml-paper-writing` skill.

**Auto-trigger**: Citation verification is automatically executed when writing papers with the ml-paper-writing skill.

**Manual reference**: Refer to this skill when you need detailed verification principles.

### Verification Step Example

**Scenario**: Need to cite the Transformer paper

```
Step 1: WebSearch lookup
Query: "Attention is All You Need Vaswani 2017"
Result: Found multiple sources for the paper

Step 2: Google Scholar verification
Query: "site:scholar.google.com Attention is All You Need Vaswani"
Result: ✅ Paper exists, 50,000+ citations, NeurIPS 2017

Step 3: Confirm details
- Title: "Attention is All You Need"
- Authors: Vaswani, Ashish; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; ...
- Year: 2017
- Venue: NeurIPS (NIPS)

Step 4: Get BibTeX

From Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar, MIT.

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