Citation Verification

Citation Verification

Use this as a verification gate. Formatting a bibliography is not enough; check whether the cited source exists and supports the claim being made.

Workflow

1. Inventory all citation-bearing artifacts: manuscript, slides, figures, tables, BibTeX, references, captions, and supplementary files.
2. Classify citation checks:
   • existence: DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, URL, title, authors, year;
   • metadata consistency: BibTeX fields match authoritative metadata;
   • claim support: the cited source actually supports the sentence or panel;
   • placeholder risk: missing references, TODO, fake-looking DOIs, malformed keys;
   • citation drift: cited paper supports a narrower or different claim.
3. Prefer authoritative sources when available: publisher page, Crossref, PubMed, OpenAlex, arXiv, official repository, or the source PDF.
4. Record uncertainty. If online verification is unavailable, mark the citation unverified, not valid.
5. Output a table with citation, location, check_type, status, evidence, and fix.

Boundaries

• Do not fabricate missing metadata.
• Do not silently replace citations with unrelated papers.
• Do not claim a citation supports a method/result unless the relevant passage was checked.
• If an API key or network access is unavailable, run structural checks and report the limitation.

Hand Off

• Use citation-management for BibTeX generation, metadata cleanup, duplicate repair, style formatting, and reference-library hygiene.
• Use research-lookup when verification shows a missing or stale citation and the next step is to find current candidate sources.
• Use paper-workflow-orchestrator when citation issues imply a larger manuscript-claim problem.
• Use literature-review when a missing citation requires field-level synthesis or related-work coverage.