PrettySeriousResearcher: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/research-references/SKILL.md

research-references is a skill for Claude Code from fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher. It costs 49 tokens per session (1,593 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A review process for checking that research citations point to real sources and that those sources support the claims they are attached to.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding citations, preparing related-work sections, or reviewing a bibliography.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of publishing plausible-looking but incorrect, outdated, or nonexistent references.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

This is fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on PrettySeriousResearcher itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything PrettySeriousResearcher configures →

Part of the research-paper-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher/main/.claude/skills/research-references/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install research-paper-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills.

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 research-references

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references/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 research-references

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fbabelle/prettyseriousresearcher/research-references.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,593 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.
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 $0.00049 $0.01593
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00796
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00319
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00159

Measured 3d ago against content hash 07e8a73c2b26, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-references 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 3d 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.

.claude/skills/research-references/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research references — anti-hallucination citation gate

LLMs invent plausible-looking citations: real-sounding titles, real authors, wrong or nonexistent papers. This skill makes that impossible to ship by forcing every reference through verification before it can be cited. The rule is simple: a citation that cannot be resolved to a real source whose content supports the claim does not go in the paper.

Run this whenever citations are added or a related-work / bibliography section is built or reviewed (Phase 1 prior-art, Phase 4 writing). Use the host agent's current web-search and page-fetch tools for discovery; this skill owns verification and the verdict.

The per-reference protocol (apply to EVERY citation)

For each proposed reference — and each in-text claim that needs one — work through these in order. Do not skip ahead; an early failure is itself the verdict.

  1. Resolve a real link. Search for a resolvable identifier — DOI, arXiv ID, ACL Anthology / OpenReview / Semantic Scholar / publisher URL, or SSRN/NBER for finance. Investigate until you find a link or have genuinely exhausted reasonable searches. Do not stop at "this sounds like a real paper."
  2. Confirm it exists as cited. Title, authors, year, and venue must match the citation. A near-match (right authors, wrong year; right title, wrong venue) is a defect to correct, not a pass — fix the metadata to the resolved source. Author-collision check: when a surfaced work's author list matches one of the project's own authors, confirm with the user whether it is theirs before using it as independent evidence — self-citations are fine but must be labelled as such (and anonymized per venue rules).
  3. Verify content. Fetch the abstract (and the relevant section if the claim is specific). Confirm the source actually supports the specific claim it's attached to. Topical overlap is not support — "uses transformers" ≠ "shows transformers beat LSTMs on this task." If the source doesn't say what the citation implies, the citation is wrong even if the paper is real.
  4. Verify relevance. The work must be relevant to this paper's specific claim/context, not merely to the broad field. A correct-but-irrelevant citation is padding — drop it.
  5. Check coverage, currency, and status. Do not exclude a relevant work because of age. Cover the canonical origin when it matters, the closest prior work, and current representative work or a recent synthesis. Check the version of record plus corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, and material superseding results. See references/recency-and-seminal.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 3d ago Changed 07e8a73c2b26
  2. 8d ago First seen · 67 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 1f9fbe285cd8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-references is a skill published in the GitHub repository fbabelle/PrettySeriousResearcher (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,593 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 2026-08-31.

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