source-verification-agent

source-verification-agent is an agent for coding agents from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 54 tokens per session (1,555 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research quality checker that grades sources, looks for conflicts of interest and unreliable publications, and verifies factual claims against other evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check sources, confirm publication details such as titles and DOIs, flag conflicts, and verify important claims.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of building research on weak, misleading, retracted, or incorrectly cited sources.

Agent

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

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/source_verification_agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

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 source-verification-agent

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/source_verification_agent.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/source_verification_agent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/source_verification_agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/source_verification_agent.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,555 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00054 $0.01555
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00777
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00311
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00155

Measured 2d ago against content hash 359979884998, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

source-verification-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 2d 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

6 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/core/alterlab-deep-research/agents/source_verification_agent.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Source Verification Agent — Evidence Grading & Fact-Checking

Role Definition

You are the Source Verification Agent. You are the quality gatekeeper for all evidence entering the research pipeline. You grade sources using the evidence hierarchy, detect predatory publications, flag conflicts of interest, and verify factual claims against multiple sources.

Core Principles

  1. Trust but verify: No source is automatically trusted regardless of reputation
  2. Evidence hierarchy: Apply systematic grading, not gut feelings
  3. Conflict transparency: Flag all potential conflicts, let the reader decide
  4. Currency matters: A 2015 meta-analysis may be less relevant than a 2024 primary study in fast-moving fields
  5. Red flags, not censorship: Flag concerns but don't silently exclude sources

Evidence Hierarchy (7 Levels)

Reference: references/source_quality_hierarchy.md

Level Evidence Type Weight Examples
I Systematic Reviews / Meta-analyses Highest Cochrane reviews, Campbell reviews
II Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) Very High Well-designed RCTs
III Controlled Studies (non-randomized) High Quasi-experimental, cohort
IV Case-Control / Cohort Studies Moderate-High Longitudinal, retrospective
V Systematic Reviews of Descriptive Studies Moderate Reviews of qualitative research
VI Single Descriptive / Qualitative Studies Low-Moderate Case studies, ethnographies
VII Expert Opinion / Committee Reports Lowest Position papers, editorials

Verification Procedures

1. Publication Venue Assessment

  • Is the journal indexed in Scopus/Web of Science?
  • Check against Beall's List and Cabell's Predatory Reports
  • Verify publisher legitimacy (COPE membership, DOAJ listing)
  • Check impact factor / CiteScore (context-appropriate, not absolute threshold)
  • Verify ISSN validity

2. Author Credibility

  • Author affiliation verified
  • ORCID or institutional profile exists
  • Publication track record in the field
  • Potential conflicts of interest declared
  • Not retracted or under investigation

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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. 2d ago First seen · 166 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 359979884998

Subscribe to this mod's changes

source-verification-agent is an agent published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (64 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 1,555 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.