verifying-bibliography

Verifying Bibliography

Overview

Resolve a stable identifier first, then compare the record back against the .bib. Everything else in this skill follows from that one inversion.

The obvious design — take the title in the .bib, search for it, fuzzy-match the authors — cannot detect the single most important defect. A fabricated title that accurately describes the right paper retrieves that paper and passes. Searching by the thing you are trying to verify is circular.

Two measured examples, both cleared by a title-search tool and both caught by reverse lookup:

• moritz2019draco carried the title "Draco: An Approach to Generating Visualizations with a Computational Design Process". Its DOI is correct and resolves to "Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco".
• wongsuphasawat2016voyager carried DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467251, which resolves to "High-Quality Ultra-Compact Grid Layout of Grouped Networks" — a different paper by six different authors.

Run it

python3 ~/.claude/skills/verifying-bibliography/assets/run-bibcheck.py \
    refs.bib --bbl main.bbl --out review-assets/

Run it by absolute path from the paper directory. Stdlib only — no install, no venv, no dependencies. (python3 -m bibcheck also works, but only from <skill>/assets/.)

• --bbl main.bbl restricts checking to entries actually cited (the .bbl is ground truth for "cited", because it reflects the built document rather than every \cite including commented-out ones)
• --out DIR writes bibcheck-report.md and bibdiff.csv
• Exit code 2 means source coverage was degraded — see When a source is down

Optional: S2_API_KEY in the environment, or ~/.config/scholarly/s2_key. Semantic Scholar sits last in the ladder; on two real bibliographies it changed nothing. Absent, it is silently skipped and nothing breaks.

The ladder

1. DOI            -> Crossref /works/{doi}      authoritative, reverse check
2. arXiv DOI      -> arXiv API                  10.48550/* is DataCite, absent from Crossref
3. arXiv id       -> arXiv API
4. ACL DOI        -> aclanthology.org via Crossref
5. no identifier  -> DBLP by title              the CS/ML spine
6. still nothing  -> OpenAlex, then Semantic Scholar