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verify-refs

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Audit-only verification of manuscript references against PubMed and CrossRef. Detects fabricated or mismatched citations and writes qc/reference_audit.json. Does not modify references/ or refs.bib.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills/blob/HEAD/skills/verify-refs/SKILL.md

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Verify References (Audit-Only)

You help a medical researcher prevent reference hallucinations before submission. This skill audits an existing manuscript or bibliography. It does not write to references/ or manuscript/_src/refs.bib. It does not discover new literature; use /search-lit for discovery and /lit-sync for bib management.

When to Use

  • Before journal submission, especially for .docx manuscripts inherited from coauthors or external editors.
  • After AI-assisted drafting or revision introduced or modified references.
  • When a reviewer or collaborator flags a possibly fabricated citation.
  • Before /sync-submission freezes a journal package.

Inputs

  1. Manuscript or bibliography path: .md, .docx, .bib, .txt, or .tsv.
  2. Optional project root. Default: current working directory.
  3. Optional flags passed to the script:
    • --offline: extract and classify references without API verification.
    • --timeout N: HTTP timeout seconds.

Companion: pandoc citation key check

For markdown manuscripts using pandoc [@bibkey] citations, validate citation keys first to catch undefined/unused keys before this audit. If you also use the companion manage-refs skill, run its check_citation_keys.py for this; otherwise use your reference manager's citation-key check.

Then run verify_refs.py against the .bib to validate each entry against PubMed/CrossRef. The two checks are complementary: a citation-key check catches mis-keyed cites; verify_refs.py catches fabricated metadata.

Deterministic Script

Run the bundled script rather than verifying citations by memory:

python "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_refs.py" manuscript/manuscript.md --project-root .

For hooks or quick manual runs, use the wrapper:

"${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_cli.sh" manuscript/manuscript.md --offline

Manual pre-submission strict run (Phase 1A.5):

"${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_cli.sh" manuscript/index.qmd --strict

--strict forbids --offline and exits non-zero on any UNVERIFIED row. Full checkpoint protocol: references/manual_checkpoint_guide.md.

The script uses DOI, PMID, CrossRef, PubMed E-utilities, and OpenAlex where available. If network verification fails, it records UNVERIFIED rather than silently passing.

OpenAlex tertiary index (existence recovery). PubMed covers only biomedical literature and CrossRef's conference-proceedings coverage is uneven, so NeurIPS / ICLR / ACL-style citations — common in medical-AI manuscripts — fall through both and would be marked UNVERIFIED. After the PubMed and CrossRef tiers, the script consults OpenAlex (https://api.openalex.org, free, no API key) only when no authoritative author list was obtained yet (so a reference already resolved by PubMed/CrossRef incurs no extra call). It resolves by DOI when present, otherwise by a title search guarded by a token-similarity threshold so a fabricated title cannot earn a spurious OK. This is the free analogue of the second index (e.g. Scopus) that journal submission portals run alongside CrossRef. OpenAlex display names carry no structured family/given split and mix First Last with Last, First forms, so OpenAlex-sourced authors support an existence check plus a tolerant first-author membership check, but never drive the strict positional or author-count MISMATCH (those stay reserved for PubMed efetch / CrossRef). An OpenAlex miss is recorded as UNVERIFIED, never FABRICATED. Pass --no-openalex to restrict verification to PubMed + CrossRef.

Output Contract (v1.3.0)

ArtifactPathPurpose
Audit JSONqc/reference_audit.jsonSole output — row-level status (OK/MISMATCH/UNVERIFIED/FABRICATED), counts, cited_authors[]/actual_authors[], duplicate_findings[], submission-safe flag, full records

v1.2.0 (2026-05) adds duplicate_findings[] to the audit JSON. Verbatim PMID or DOI duplicates within the reference list are flagged as MAJOR findings (resolves /peer-review Phase 2A P7). DOI normalization strips https://doi.org/, http://dx.doi.org/, doi: prefixes plus trailing slashes before comparison so https://doi.org/10.x/abc/ and 10.x/abc collapse to one key. Both submission_safe and fully_verified now require duplicate_findings to be empty.

v1.3.0 (2026-05) extends the author cross-check from first-author-only to the full author list and bumps schema_version to 4. For BibTeX inputs, every cited author family name is compared index-by-index against the authoritative source, and the cited-vs-source author counts are compared. PubMed efetch.fcgi (XML full record) is the truth source when a PMID is present — it is authoritative for given/family names where CrossRef is not (a documented case where CrossRef returned a wrong given name that PubMed efetch corrected). Records now carry cited_authors[], actual_authors[], cited_author_count, and actual_author_count. Motivation: a real AI-assisted manuscript registered a reference with a correct first author but seven of ten fabricated co-author names, and the first-author-only check passed it. Plain-text / TSV inputs, which cannot be parsed into a confident full list, degrade gracefully to the first-author check.

Removed in Phase 1A.2 (per docs/artifact_contract.md):

  • references/verified_references.tsv — record-level details now live inside reference_audit.json under records[].
  • references/library.bib — never this skill's concern. /search-lit produces candidates; /lit-sync (via Better BibTeX) writes manuscript/_src/refs.bib.

Sole-writer enforcement: scripts/validate_project_contract.py will flag any references/* file written by this skill as drift.

Workflow

  1. Identify the input file and project root.
  2. Run scripts/verify_refs.py.
  3. Read qc/reference_audit.json.
  4. Report all FABRICATED and MISMATCH rows first (from records[]).
  5. Report all duplicate_findings[] entries (verbatim PMID/DOI duplicates — cite renumbering required).
  6. If UNVERIFIED rows remain, list them as manual checks and do not call the manuscript fully submission-safe. Rows with note = "pagination_placeholder" (e000–e000 / in press / TBD / forthcoming) need the citation resolved before submission; /self-review Phase 2.5c decides whether any is a P0 blocker.
  7. If the user needs a human-readable table, summarize from records[] in chat — do not write a TSV.

Quality Gates

  • Gate 1: stop submission if any row is FABRICATED.
  • Gate 2: require user confirmation before accepting UNVERIFIED references.
  • Gate 3: rerun after any reference edits.
  • Gate 4 (added 2026-04-26; extended to full-author in v1.3.0): the cited author list is cross-checked against the authoritative source (PubMed efetch preferred, then CrossRef, then PubMed esummary). A row whose DOI/PMID resolves but whose cited authors do not match — at any index, or in total count — is downgraded to MISMATCH. First-author mismatches get note = "first-author hallucination suspected"; #2..#N family or count mismatches get note = "non-first-author hallucination or count mismatch". This catches the LLM failure mode where a real DOI is paired with invented author names anywhere in the list, not just the lead author. Intentional CSL et-al truncation (cited fewer than source) can be silenced per-entry with a BibTeX _audit_truncated = <N> field.
  • Gate 5 (added 2026-05, v1.2.0): PMID/DOI duplicate detection within the reference list. Verbatim duplicates (same PMID or normalized DOI) — a common LLM citation-compilation artifact — are flagged as MAJOR findings in duplicate_findings[]. submission_safe == true requires the list to be empty. Resolves /peer-review Phase 2A P7.
  • Gate 6 (added 2026-06): pagination / publication-stage placeholders. A reference whose raw entry still carries e000–e000, in press, TBD, or forthcoming is not yet a fully citable record. Each is marked UNVERIFIED with note = "pagination_placeholder" (a would-be VERIFIED record is downgraded; a worse status is left unchanged). verify-refs is manuscript-agnostic and does not judge centrality — it only flags. The escalation call (is this a method- or headline-load-bearing citation, hence a P0 submission blocker?) is made by /self-review Phase 2.5c, which has the manuscript in hand.

Classification note — citation-metadata confusion is not fabrication. Digits in a DOI suffix sometimes look like a journal article number but differ from the real one (e.g., a DOI tail "77196" against article number 26068, or a "60466-1" suffix against article 6274). This is cosmetic metadata confusion, not a fabricated reference: do not record such rows as FABRICATED when the DOI/PMID resolves and the authors match. A genuine FABRICATED verdict requires a non-resolving identifier or an author cross-check failure (Gate 4), not a mismatch between a DOI suffix and an article number.

Author Cross-Check (Detail)

Driven by two actual incidents. First (Gate 4 origin): a manuscript had a reference cited with a plausible lead author but the correct DOI for an entirely different author's whitepaper. Pre-patch verify-refs marked it OK because the DOI resolved; post-patch it is MISMATCH. Second (v1.3.0 extension): an AI-assembled .bib registered a reference with the correct first author but seven of ten fabricated co-author names — the first-author-only check passed it, and it would have shipped to reviewers. The full-author cross-check catches it.

  • The authoritative author list is taken from PubMed efetch.fcgi (XML) when a PMID is present, falling back to CrossRef (DOI) and then PubMed esummary. efetch is preferred because CrossRef is unreliable for given names.
  • For BibTeX inputs, the full cited list is parsed (cited_authors[], balanced-brace aware, LaTeX-accent tolerant) and compared family-by-family and by total count against actual_authors[].
  • Comparison is tolerant: case, diacritics (NFKD plus Turkish/Polish/Czech/ German/Nordic special letters), hyphen vs space, and name particles ("von", "van", "de", ...) are normalized before matching.
  • If the cited authors cannot be parsed confidently, the check degrades to the first-author surname comparison, and if even that is empty it is skipped silently — no false MISMATCH from formatting ambiguity.
  • Title-only PubMed search does not return an authoritative author and is therefore excluded from this check.
  • Intentional truncation (a bib that cites only the first author, or first five
    • et al., by design) would otherwise trip the count check; mark such entries with _audit_truncated = <N> to downgrade the count mismatch to a note.

What This Skill Does NOT Do

  • Does not generate new references from memory.
  • Does not replace missing citations with plausible alternatives without /search-lit or user approval.
  • Does not sync Zotero collections; use /lit-sync after this audit.

Anti-Hallucination

  • Never fabricate titles, DOIs, PMIDs, author lists, journal names, years, volumes, or pages.
  • Every OK row must be backed by DOI, PMID, CrossRef, or PubMed title evidence.
  • If evidence is unavailable, mark UNVERIFIED and keep it visible.