citation-verifier

citation-verifier is a skill for Codex from Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills. It costs 31 tokens per session (1,244 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checklist for checking the internal consistency of citations and bibliographies in research manuscripts. It checks items such as DOI or PMID identifiers, duplicate reference keys and placeholder references; it does not prove that a paper exists or supports a claim.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect manuscript citations, bibliography files and BibTeX entries before submitting or revising a paper.
Why use it?
It catches reference-format problems before submission while making clear that separate checks are needed to verify papers and evidence.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: reads ~/.codex or $CODEX_HOME. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to inspect manuscript citations, bibliography files and BibTeX entries before submitting or revising a paper.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/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 Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills --skill citation-verifier
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills

Made for: Codex.

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-verifier

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/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 citation-verifier

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/citation-verifier.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,244 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Agent Snooping · line 45
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 46
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 $0.00031 $0.01244
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00622
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00249
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00124

Measured 13d ago against content hash ec1c71c7297a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

citation-verifier 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 13d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/audit_bib.py, scripts/scan_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.

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.

skills/core/citation-verifier/SKILL.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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.

This is stage one of three. It shows the bibliography is well-formed; it cannot show that the cited papers are real, and it cannot show that a real paper supports the sentence citing it. Hand the surviving entries to reference-audit-guide (optional set, installed with --set all), which queries CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and PubMed to confirm existence and match metadata, then to claim-source-verification for claim-to-evidence support. When reference-audit-guide is not installed, say that existence was not machine-verified rather than letting a clean local scan stand in for it. A fabricated citation carrying a well-formed DOI passes this skill and fails the next one.

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:

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 13d ago First seen · 115 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A ec1c71c7297a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

citation-verifier is a skill published in the GitHub repository Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills (490 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 1,244 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 2026-08-30.

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