citation-verification

citation-verification is a skill for Claude Code from Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar. It costs 63 tokens per session (1,679 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide for checking that academic citations point to real, correctly described scholarly sources. It covers sources such as arXiv, DOI registries, research databases, publisher pages, and Zotero.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing or reviewing research papers, especially when text or references were produced with AI.
Why use it?
It helps catch invented papers, wrong authors or dates, missing references, and inconsistent citation details before submission.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the claude-scholar plugin — 45 skills, 34 commands, 6 agents, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing or reviewing research papers, especially when text or references were produced with AI.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification
About the project

Claude Scholar is a semi-automated research assistant for academic research and software development, supporting literature review, coding, experiments, reporting, writing, and project knowledge management. Computer science and AI researchers use it across the research workflow with several coding-agent platforms; the catalogue contains its skills, commands, agents, hooks, plugin, and instruction.

Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar · 5,419 stars · on GitHub

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 Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar --skill citation-verification
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-scholar, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 45 skills, 34 commands, 6 agents, 5 hooks.

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-verification

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification/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-verification

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/citation-verification.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,679 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
  • Socket pass 13 May 2026
  • Snyk warn 13 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, 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 Excessive Agency · line 103
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00063 $0.01679
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00839
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00336
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00168

Measured 11d ago against content hash c98a1be776ee, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

citation-verification 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 11d 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/citation-verification/SKILL.md · 205 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 205 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Citation Verification Reference Guide

A reference guide for citation verification in academic paper writing, providing verification principles and best practices.

Core Principle: Proactively verify every citation during the writing process using programmatic or canonical scholarly sources first: arXiv, DOI/CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, publisher landing pages, and Zotero metadata. Google Scholar is useful for manual discovery, but it is not the canonical verification authority.

Core Problems

Citation issues in academic papers seriously impact research integrity:

  1. Fake citations - Citing non-existent papers (common issue with AI-generated citations)
  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

Special risk with AI-assisted writing: AI-generated citations have approximately 40% error rate; every citation must be verified via WebSearch.

Verification Principles

This skill provides verification principles based on canonical scholarly metadata and claim-level checking:

1. Proactive Verification (Verify During Writing)

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

  • Search for the paper via WebSearch each time a citation is needed
  • Confirm the paper exists on Google Scholar
  • Add to bibliography only after verification passes

2. Canonical Metadata Verification

Preferred authority order:

  1. DOI / publisher landing page
  2. arXiv ID or arXiv landing page
  3. CrossRef
  4. Semantic Scholar
  5. Zotero metadata imported from a verified identifier
  6. Google Scholar only for manual discovery or fallback lookup

Verification steps:

  1. Find a DOI, arXiv ID, publisher URL, or verified Zotero item.
  2. Confirm title, first author, year, venue, and identifier.
  3. Fetch BibTeX from CrossRef, arXiv, publisher metadata, Zotero, or another programmatic source when possible.
  4. If only Google Scholar can find the item, mark it as manual verification and do not treat the BibTeX as final until metadata is checked elsewhere.

Read the full file on GitHub · 205 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. 11d ago First seen · 205 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A c98a1be776ee

Subscribe to this mod's changes

citation-verification is a skill published in the GitHub repository Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar (5,419 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 1,679 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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