bibcheck verify

Scientific papers and technical reports often contain fabricated or hallucinated citations that are difficult to spot manually. This skill automates the verification of bibliographies by cross-referencing metadata against Crossref and OpenAlex databases. It converts raw citations from PDFs, Markdown, or BibTeX into structured queries and flags high-risk entries for manual review.

What it does

• Multi-format extraction identifies citation metadata from PDF, Markdown, text, or BibTeX files.
• Automated verification cross-references extracted titles, authors, and DOIs with Crossref and OpenAlex.
• Hallucination detection flags references that cannot be found in major academic indexes.
• Triage reporting generates a summary of verified, low-confidence, and suspected-hallucination citations.
• Metadata normalization structures fragmented citation data into a standardized JSON format for processing.

How it works

1. The agent reads the source bibliography and extracts metadata for every citation, preserving the original order.
2. It generates a temporary JSON file containing structured titles, authors, years, and search queries.
3. The bibcheck-verify utility runs against the original file using the structured metadata as a reference.
4. The skill parses the resulting triage report to identify which citations require human verification.

Frameworks & tools

This skill requires Python 3.11+ or the uv package manager. It utilizes the bibcheck-verify Python package and connects to the Crossref and OpenAlex public APIs via HTTPS.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

LLMs are prone to confirming their own hallucinations when asked to verify text. This skill forces the agent to check external, authoritative academic databases, providing evidence-based verification rather than probabilistic guesses.

Use cases

• Peer review to verify that a submitted manuscript contains legitimate and accurately cited references.
• Academic writing to ensure your own bibliography lacks accidental hallucinations or broken DOIs.
• Technical due diligence to validate the sources cited in whitepapers or technical reports.

Known limitations

Requires outbound HTTPS access to api.crossref.org and api.openalex.org. Triage labels like "suspected_hallucination" are not definitive proof of fabrication and always require human review.