verify-citations

verify-citations is a skill for Claude Code from ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills. It costs 140 tokens per session (3,556 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A bibliography-checking tool for BibTeX files, which store references for papers and technical documents. It compares each reference with scholarly indexes such as Crossref, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and DataCite.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to validate a .bib file, identify references that need review, compare different versions of a work, and optionally check whether added references fit the topic.
Why use it?
It helps detect made-up, incorrect, mismatched, or retracted citations before a paper is submitted. It also reports when a source could not be checked instead of treating it as verified.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the paper-search plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to validate a .bib file, identify references that need review, compare different versions of a work, and optionally check whether added references fit the topic.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations
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 ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills --skill verify-citations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install paper-search, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 verify-citations

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations/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 verify-citations

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/verify-citations.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 140 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,556 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 $0.00140 $0.03556
Opus 5 $0.00070 $0.01778
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00711
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00356

Measured 11d ago against content hash d6e96ee70810, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

verify-citations 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 1 executable file (scripts/check_bibtex.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/verify-citations/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Verify Citations

The anti-hallucination gate for bibliographies. Takes a .bib file, validates every entry against live scholarly indexes (Crossref, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, DataCite), and produces a per-entry verdict: VERIFIED, MISMATCH, UNRESOLVED (possible fabrication), or RETRACTED. One fabricated citation in a submitted paper can end a review — or a reputation. Be rigorous here.

Resolving is necessary but not sufficient. An identifier that resolves only proves the entry points at a real record — not that it is the right instance of the named work, nor that an independently-added reference is even on-topic. The gate therefore goes beyond resolution with two non-fabricating heuristics: a canonical-instance check (when a title exists as both, say, a conference paper and a later RFC/tech-report/preprint, surface the alternatives with citation counts so you cite the artifact the field cites) and an opt-in relevance gate (score an added reference's topical fit and flag low-fit ones for human review). And when an authoritative index is unreachable, the run reports PARTIAL-PASS, never a clean PASS, naming the checks that did not run — so "could not check" is never mistaken for "checked and clean".

When to use

  • The user asks to verify, check, validate, or audit citations / references / a bibliography / a .bib file.
  • Any writing skill (draft-related-work, literature-review, write-rebuttal, ...) added or edited citations — run this gate before declaring that work done.
  • Before preflight-check / submission, camera-ready, or arXiv upload.
  • The user suspects AI-generated references ("are these real papers?").

Inputs

  • A .bib file (path from the user, or find it: *.bib next to the main .tex, or the file named in \bibliography{...} / \addbibresource{...}).
  • CONTACT_EMAIL environment variable — a real email, sent in the User-Agent so API providers can contact instead of block. Ask the user for it if unset; never invent one.
  • Optional: S2_API_KEY for a dedicated Semantic Scholar rate allowance (the shared anonymous pool 429s under load; the script backs off and falls back to other providers automatically).

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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 · 233 lines · 140 tokens per session scan A d6e96ee70810

Subscribe to this mod's changes

verify-citations is a skill published in the GitHub repository ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills (42 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 140 tokens to every session and 3,556 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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