reference-audit-guide

reference-audit-guide is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills. It costs 131 tokens per session (738 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A live-reference checking workflow for confirming that cited academic works exist and that their bibliographic details are correct. It queries scholarly services such as Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and PubMed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to verify citations against live scholarly databases, including titles, authors, identifiers, and publication metadata.
Why use it?
It catches fabricated references and metadata errors that a local bibliography-format check cannot detect. Confirming that a paper exists does not, by itself, prove that it supports a particular claim.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to verify citations against live scholarly databases, including titles, authors, identifiers, and publication metadata.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/reference-audit-guide
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 reference-audit-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills

Made for: Claude Code, 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 reference-audit-guide

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/reference-audit-guide"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/boom5426/nature-paper-skills/reference-audit-guide.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 131 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 738 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 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 $0.00131 $0.00738
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.00369
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00148
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00074

Measured 12d ago against content hash 025be632bab4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reference-audit-guide 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/api-clients.py, scripts/format-checker.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.

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/optional/reference-audit-guide/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Citation Verification Reference Guide

Verification principles plus runnable citation checkers for academic writing.

Position in the citation pipeline

This repository separates three citation questions that are routinely confused. Run them in order.

  1. citation-verifier: is the bibliography a well-formed artifact? Duplicate keys, missing fields, DOI syntax, cited-but-undefined. Offline, immediate.
  2. This skill: does the cited work exist, and does its metadata match what the manuscript says? Queries live scholarly APIs. This is the only stage that catches a fabricated citation carrying a well-formed DOI.
  3. claim-source-verification: does the real, correctly-cited source actually support the sentence citing it?

None of the three substitutes for another. A clean local scan shows the bibliography is well-formed, not that the papers are real. A verified DOI shows the paper is real, not that it says what the sentence claims.

Core Principle: Proactively verify every citation during the writing process using trusted scholarly sources rather than memory.

Core Problems

Citation issues in academic papers seriously impact research integrity:

  1. Fake citations - Citing non-existent papers
  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

Verification Principles

This skill provides verification principles based on trusted scholarly sources:

1. Proactive Verification

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

  • Search for the paper each time a citation is needed
  • Confirm the paper exists in a trusted source
  • Add to bibliography only after verification passes

2. Source Hierarchy

Prefer these sources:

  • publisher page or DOI resolver
  • PubMed for biomedical papers
  • arXiv for preprints
  • Crossref or Semantic Scholar for metadata cross-checking
  • Google Scholar as a fallback discovery aid

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 12d ago First seen · 95 lines · 131 tokens per session scan A 025be632bab4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reference-audit-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository Boom5426/Nature-Paper-Skills (490 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 131 tokens to every session and 738 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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