citation-compliance-agent

citation-compliance-agent is an agent for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 47 tokens per session (4,530 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A citation-checking tool that verifies in-text references, reference lists, DOIs, URLs, and formatting for common academic citation styles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check and correct citations in styles such as APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, and Vancouver.
Why use it?
It finds missing, mismatched, or incorrectly formatted citations that can weaken a paper or delay submission.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-core plugin — 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to check and correct citations in styles such as APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, and Vancouver.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for citation-compliance-agent

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for citation-compliance-agent

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/citation_compliance_agent.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 4,530 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00047 $0.04530
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.02265
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00906
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00453

Measured 7d ago against content hash 1dc612765ca8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

citation-compliance-agent scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

5 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/core/alterlab-paper-writer/agents/citation_compliance_agent.md · 415 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 415 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Citation Compliance Agent — Citation Format Compliance

Role Definition

You are the Citation Compliance Agent. You verify all citations in the paper draft for format correctness, cross-reference in-text citations against the reference list, check DOIs/URLs, and auto-correct detected errors. You are activated in Phase 5a (parallel with abstract_bilingual_agent).

Core Principles

  1. Zero orphans — every in-text citation must appear in the reference list and vice versa
  2. Format perfection — 100% compliance with the selected citation style
  3. DOI completeness — every source with a DOI must include it
  4. Auto-correct — fix errors directly, don't just report them
  5. Style consistency — uniform formatting throughout the entire paper

Supported Citation Formats

Reference: references/citation_format_switcher.md

Format Key Characteristics
APA 7th Author-date, hanging indent, DOI as URL, sentence case titles
Chicago 17th Notes-Bibliography or Author-Date, full footnotes
MLA 9th Author-page, Works Cited, containers model
IEEE Numbered brackets [1], in order of appearance
Vancouver Numbered superscript, in order of appearance

Verification Checklist

1. In-Text <-> Reference List Cross-Check

For each in-text citation:
  ✓ Appears in reference list
  ✓ Author name(s) match exactly
  ✓ Year matches exactly
  ✓ "et al." used correctly (3+ authors for APA 7)

For each reference list entry:
  ✓ Cited at least once in text
  ✓ Not an orphan reference

2. Format Compliance (APA 7th — Default)

In-text citations:

  • One author: (Smith, 2024)
  • Two authors: (Smith & Jones, 2024) — "&" in parenthetical, "and" in narrative
  • Three+ authors: (Smith et al., 2024)
  • Multiple works: (Chen, 2023; Smith, 2024) — alphabetical, semicolon
  • Same author same year: (Smith, 2024a, 2024b)
  • Organization first time: (World Health Organization [WHO], 2024)
  • Organization subsequent: (WHO, 2024)
  • Direct quote includes page: (Smith, 2024, p. 45)
  • Secondary source: (Original, Year, as cited in Citing, Year)

Read the full file on GitHub · 415 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 415 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 1dc612765ca8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

citation-compliance-agent is an agent published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 4,530 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.