Citation Guard AI Reference Verification & Retraction Check

Academic integrity relies on verifiable sources, yet manual citation auditing is slow and prone to oversight. Citation Guard automates the verification of bibliographies by cross-referencing user-supplied data against live Crossref and PubMed records to identify discrepancies, retractions, and missing metadata.

What it does

• Source verification checks DOIs and PMIDs against authoritative scholarly databases to confirm record existence.
• Metadata auditing compares titles, authors, and publication venues to identify field-level mismatches or formatting errors.
• Retraction flagging detects official retraction or correction signals directly from Crossref and PubMed metadata.
• Evidence logging generates a transparent trail including retrieval dates, query strings, and source URLs for every check.
• Priority reporting categorizes citations by status, from verified matches to high-priority mismatches requiring human review.

How it works

1. Input the citation list or bibliography and specify a preferred citation style if formatting is required.
2. Normalize the data by extracting DOIs, PMIDs, and titles while preserving the original source text.
3. Query official Crossref and PubMed API endpoints using identifiers or title-based search logic.
4. Audit the retrieved metadata against the input fields to assign a primary status like VERIFIED_MATCH or RETRACTION_SIGNAL.
5. Review the generated audit table to address flags, correct metadata, or investigate retracted works.

Frameworks & tools

This skill utilizes the Crossref REST API and NCBI E-utilities (PubMed) for real-time bibliographic data retrieval.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic LLMs often hallucinate DOIs or claim retracted papers are valid because their training data is static. This skill forces live lookups against official registries, ensuring that verification is based on current evidence rather than probabilistic text generation.

Use cases

• Audit a manuscript bibliography before journal submission to ensure all DOIs are functional.
• Screen a literature review for retracted or corrected studies to maintain research quality.
• Clean up inconsistent metadata in a shared reference library or Zotero export.
• Verify the existence of obscure citations that appear potentially fabricated or incorrect.

Known limitations

Does not prove a paper is fabricated if not found. Requires live API access to Crossref and PubMed. Limited to scholarly works indexed in these two databases.