verify-citation — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited verify-citation (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
Verify that a paper exists before writing it as a citation.
Inspired by the citation-verification patterns in flonat/claude-research and Imbad0202/academic-research-skills.
Run /verify-citation before writing any new citation into a .tex, .bib, or .md file. If the user asks you to "add a reference to X", run this skill first — do not write the citation until verification passes.
/verify-citation "Author, Title, Year"
/verify-citation "the paper we discussed about spectral geometry"
/verify-citation (no argument — verify all citations in the last assistant turn)Step 1 — Extract the citation. If an argument is given, use it. Otherwise, extract every paper reference from the last assistant turn (titles, author–year pairs, DOIs, arXiv IDs).
Step 2 — Search. For each citation, search at least two of:
https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=all&query=<title+author>https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query=<title>https://api.openalex.org/works?search=<title>Use WebSearch or WebFetch to run the searches.
Step 3 — Report verdict.
| Result | Action |
|---|---|
| Found on 2+ sources, title and authors match | VERIFIED — write the citation |
| Found on 1 source, minor title variation | LIKELY — note the discrepancy, write with caution |
| Found on 0 sources, or title/author mismatch | UNVERIFIED — do NOT write the citation |
For UNVERIFIED: say "I cannot confirm this paper exists. Do you have a DOI or arXiv ID?" Do not invent an alternative. Do not write a citation that cannot be verified.
Step 4 — Write the citation (VERIFIED and LIKELY only). Use the metadata from the verified source (exact title, exact authors, correct year). Never reconstruct citation details from memory — use what the database returned.
and the details are correct.
the hardest fabrication to detect).
with a slightly different title.
Add this to your project's CLAUDE.md to make this the default:
Never write a citation into any file without first running /verify-citation.
If you cannot confirm a paper exists on Semantic Scholar, arXiv, or OpenAlex,
say so explicitly and wait for a DOI or arXiv ID from me.~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.