Use this skill when a task asks you to validate, repair, deduplicate, or format academic citations. Treat citation work as evidence work: never invent metadata, venues, DOIs, authors, or publication years.
Workflow
- Parse every citation entry first. Record the key, title, authors, venue, year, DOI/URL/PMID/arXiv ID, and any suspicious fields.
- Verify identifiers before prose. Prefer DOI resolution, Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, ACL Anthology, DBLP, publisher pages, or other primary metadata sources over search-result snippets.
- Check whether title, authors, venue, year, and identifier all refer to the same work. A real DOI attached to the wrong title is still a bad citation.
- Flag hallucinated or fake citations when identifiers do not resolve, the claimed venue appears nonexistent, or no credible source supports the title.
- Keep uncertain cases separate from confirmed fake cases unless the requested schema has no uncertainty bucket.
- When producing BibTeX, normalize braces and escaping, preserve meaningful capitalization, and include only fields supported by evidence.
- Return exactly the requested output format. If JSON is requested, return valid JSON only.
Evidence Standards
- A valid DOI is strong evidence only if it resolves to the same title and authors in the citation.
- Missing DOI alone does not make a citation fake; books, older papers, and proceedings may lack DOIs.
- Generic titles, generic author names, unverified venues, impossible DOI prefixes, and absent source coverage are warning signs, not final proof by themselves.
- If the task provides a source-of-truth excerpt, use it as evidence and state any mismatch against it.