kb-validate-citations

Validate Knowledge Base Citations

Catch obvious citation hallucinations in library files. Deep research engines occasionally fabricate DOIs, attribute findings to the wrong author, or invent journal names. Manual spot-checking 10-20% of citations remains necessary; this skill automates the obvious failure cases so manual review can focus on subtler issues.

Argument

Optional file path or glob to scope validation. Default: all library files in library/**/*.md excluding the index files.

Examples:

• library/dora-metrics.md — single file
• library/dora-*.md — files matching a pattern
• (no argument) — all library files

Preflight

• Verify the knowledge base is configured.
• Verify network access (DOI resolution requires HTTPS to https://doi.org).

Steps

1. Discover library files

Use Glob to find files matching the scope. Exclude:

• library/_shelf-index.md
• library/_index.md
• library/log.md
• library/raw/**

2. Extract citations from each file

For each library file, parse the ## Key References section and the inline citations in ## Core Findings. Identify three citation types:

DOI citations — strings matching the DOI regex: 10\.\d{4,9}/[-._;()/:A-Z0-9]+ (case-insensitive). DOIs are the strongest signal because they're machine-resolvable.

arXiv IDs — strings matching arXiv:\d{4}\.\d{4,5} or arxiv\.org/abs/\d{4}\.\d{4,5}.

Journal references — anything matching the pattern <authors>. (<year>). "<title>." <Journal Name>, <volume>(<issue>), <pages>. or similar bibliographic format. Best-effort extraction; not all citations follow a standard format.

3. Validate each citation type

DOI resolution

For each DOI, attempt to resolve it via:

curl -sLI "https://doi.org/<doi>" -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}"

Expected: HTTP 302 or 200 (redirected to the publisher landing page). Failure: HTTP 404 (DOI does not exist) or 500 (DOI registry error).

Classify each result:

• OK: 200/302
• NOT FOUND: 404 — flag as likely hallucinated
• TRANSIENT: 500/timeout/network failure — soft-fail with "could not verify"