Citation audit

Skill sokolmarek/researcher/skills/citation-audit

Audit every citation in a manuscript for existence and for faithfulness. Triggers when user says: 'audit my citations', 'verify all citations', 'check every reference', 'citation integrity check', 'do my sources exist', 'are my citations real', 'audit the bibliography', 'verify citations before submission', 'citation audit'. Runs a two-level check: an existence gate (does each reference resolve, and is it retracted) and a claim-faithfulness audit (does each cited passage actually support the claim). Use this for a whole-manuscript integrity pass; for one claim, use fact-checking; for cleaning a .bib, use citation-management.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add sokolmarek/researcher --skill citation-audit

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

3 stars3 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

5.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Citation Audit

The integrity workhorse. It answers two questions about a manuscript's citations, in order: do the sources exist, and do they say what the manuscript claims they say. It refuses to mark a manuscript clean on any refusal-grade finding, and every verdict it reports names the layer it was verified against.

Invoked as /researcher:verify-citations. It is also what the compile gate's C004 and C005 checks call into for re-verification.

CRITICAL INTEGRITY RULE

The worst thing this system can do is tell an honest author that a real citation they read and cited correctly does not exist. So the four-state identity verdict is consumed here, never a boolean (D9), and only two identity states are refusal-grade: unresolvable (every queried source returned a clean negative) and mismatch (a resolving source disagrees on the metadata). inconclusive is NEVER refusal-grade: it means a source was rate-limited, or only one index holds the paper, and neither is evidence of fabrication. On the status axis, retracted is refusal-grade; on the faithfulness axis, contradicted is. Everything else is surfaced for the author, not used to accuse them.

Canonical copy: references/integrity-constraints.md.

Level 1: the existence gate

For every entry in the manuscript's .bib, run the core verify-bib and status commands:

uv run --project "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core" python -m researcher_core verify-bib manuscript/references/library.bib --json
uv run --project "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core" python -m researcher_core status manuscript/references/library.bib --json

Read, per entry:

verify-bib: the axis (a) identity verdict (verified / mismatch / unresolvable / inconclusive) with its per-source outcomes, plus the axis (b) status and axis (d) accessibility fields.
status: the axis (b) verdict (current / corrected / retracted / expression-of-concern).

An entry is refusal-grade only if its identity is unresolvable or mismatch, or its status is retracted. Report those as blocking. Report inconclusive entries and expression-of-concern entries as open items for the author to review; they do not block by themselves.

Level 2: the claim-faithfulness audit

For each claim that cites a source, anchor the claim against the source's actual text through the M2 passage index, with three layers of anchor:

uv run --project "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core" python -m researcher_core passages index <doi> --json
uv run --project "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core" python -m researcher_core faithfulness "<claim>" --doc <doi> --json

The three anchors, all of which a clean pairing carries:

A supporting quote: the exact passage text the verdict rests on.
A passage locator: the stable passage id (and page coordinates) so the quote can be found again.
A retrieved-metadata match: the source the passage came from is the source the claim cites.

The faithfulness verdict is supported, partial, contradicted, or insufficient-passage. Only contradicted is refusal-grade. insufficient-passage (the source has no retrievable full text, so the claim degraded to abstract level) is an OPEN ITEM, never clean and never a refusal (D11), and the report says the claim was verified at abstract level, not full text.

Be honest about the layer: axis (c) is a lexical baseline (measured coverage 0.750). It can call an overstatement supported, so a supported verdict here is a floor, not a proof, and the report says so. A human confirms the borderline pairings.

The verdict

The manuscript is marked clean only when there are zero refusal-grade findings at either level: zero unresolvable, zero mismatch, zero retracted, zero contradicted. Open items (inconclusive, expression-of-concern, insufficient-passage) are listed for the author but do not by themselves prevent a clean verdict; the report states how many are outstanding.

Every claim verdict states the layer it was verified against (abstract vs full-text), and every refusal names the specific entry and the reason.

Standing regression case

The seeded fake in examples/research-verification/citation-audit.md (guarded by the expect-unresolvable marker, D8) must always come back unresolvable. If it ever resolves, the audit is broken, not the example.

Degradation (D3)

Without uv or core/, the audit falls back to scripts/bib-validator.py for the existence gate (the stdlib brace-aware parser plus CrossRef checks) and states plainly that the faithfulness audit needs core and was not run, rather than reporting a clean bill it did not earn. Scite MCP, when connected, enriches the existence gate with smart-citation context.