alterlab-citation-verifier

alterlab-citation-verifier is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 231 tokens per session (3,102 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A verification skill that cross-checks each bibliography entry against Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and arXiv, which are public scholarly databases and archives. It matches titles and authors, resolves identifiers, and assigns a verdict.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to verify BibTeX or other bibliographies, check DOI and arXiv references, detect citation hallucinations, and group results by severity.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable way to find references that are missing, fabricated, or retracted instead of relying on memory or appearance. It also makes limited or unavailable network access explicit.

Skill 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 verify BibTeX or other bibliographies, check DOI and arXiv references, detect citation hallucinations, and group results by severity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier
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.

Any agent
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-citation-verifier
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 alterlab-citation-verifier

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier/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 alterlab-citation-verifier

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-citation-verifier.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 231 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,102 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00231 $0.03102
Opus 5 $0.00115 $0.01551
Sonnet 5 $0.00046 $0.00620
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00310

Measured 8d ago against content hash 500ba01e06b0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-citation-verifier scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/claim_faithfulness.py, scripts/verify_citations.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

falls back to the Python stdlib (`urllib`) — so it runs with **zero extra
skills/core/alterlab-citation-verifier/SKILL.md · 234 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 234 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Citation Verifier — Existence-Verify a Bibliography Against Public Scholarly APIs

The headline existence-verification skill: given a bibliography in any common form, it proves entry-by-entry whether each reference actually exists by querying four keyless public scholarly APIs, then maps each result to the canonical AlterLab citation-hallucination taxonomy. It is the deterministic, network-grounded companion to the LLM-driven integrity_verification_agent — where that agent uses WebSearch + judgment, this skill uses authoritative API records and a reproducible Python script, so the same input always yields the same verdicts.

Quick Start

Verify the citations in references.bib
Check whether these DOIs resolve to the papers I cited
Audit my bibliography for fabricated / hallucinated references
Does this reference list contain any fake citations or retractions?

→ Run scripts/verify_citations.py over the bibliography, read the JSON, then present a verdict table grouped by severity. Always state the offline/degraded status explicitly if the network was unavailable.


WHAT This Does

For each bibliography entry the script:

  1. Parses the input (auto-detects BibTeX / DOI-list / free-form), extracting title, authors, year, venue, DOI, and arXiv ID.
  2. Resolves identifiers — looks up the cited DOI/arXiv ID directly when present.
  3. Searches by title as a fallback across all four sources.
  4. Fuzzy-matches the cited title (difflib SequenceMatcher ratio, default threshold 0.70) and computes author-surname overlap.
  5. Flags retractions marked in Crossref (update-to: retraction) or OpenAlex (is_retracted).
  6. Emits a verdict per entry mapped to the taxonomy below, plus a repo-level summary.verdict (PASS / PASS_WITH_CONDITIONS / FAIL / UNVERIFIED).

The four sources (all keyless, polite-pool)

Source Endpoint Used for
Crossref api.crossref.org/works DOI resolution, metadata, retraction flag
OpenAlex api.openalex.org/works DOI + title search, is_retracted
Semantic Scholar api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1 DOI/arXiv resolution, title search
arXiv export.arxiv.org/api/query arXiv ID resolution, preprint title search

Read the full file on GitHub · 234 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 8d ago First seen · 234 lines · 231 tokens per session scan A 500ba01e06b0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-citation-verifier is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 231 tokens to every session and 3,102 once invoked, about $0.0012 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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