citation-assistant

Overview

The citation-assistant skill automatically finds uncited claims in LaTeX manuscripts, searches for the right papers, fetches official BibTeX entries (never fabricates), and inserts \cite{} commands at the right locations. This eliminates the manual process of hunting down citations for statements, methods, datasets, and claims that lack proper attribution.

The skill uses a multi-stage pipeline:

1. Parse the LaTeX source to extract text content and existing citations
2. Identify statements that need citations but lack them
3. Generate targeted search queries for each identified location
4. Search academic databases (Semantic Scholar, DBLP, arXiv)
5. Fetch official BibTeX entries for the best-matching papers
6. Insert citations into the .tex files using the appropriate commands
7. Merge all BibTeX entries into a unified references file

Input

One or more .tex file paths provided as arguments. The skill automatically:

• Detects existing .bib files in the same directory as the .tex files
• Parses \bibliography{} and \addbibresource{} commands to locate referenced bibliography files
• Reads all provided .tex files and any detected .bib files to understand the current citation state

Setup

Install required dependencies using:

pip install -r BASE_DIR/scripts/requirements.txt

Ensure the following Python scripts are available in the BASE_DIR/scripts/ directory:

• paper_search.py — searches Semantic Scholar and DBLP
• bibtex_utils.py — fetches and merges BibTeX entries

Workflow

Step 1: Parse LaTeX

Read all provided .tex files using the Read tool. Extract:

• All existing \cite{}, \citep{}, and \citet{} commands and their citation keys
• All \bibliography{} and \addbibresource{} references to locate bibliography files
• The full text content with LaTeX commands stripped for analysis
• Note the citation command style used in the document (to match in subsequent insertions)

Step 2: Identify Uncited Statements