alterlab-ieu/alterlab-citation-verifier
Verifies that every entry in a bibliography ACTUALLY EXISTS by cross-checking it against four keyless public scholarly APIs (Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv) with a polite mailto identifier, resolving DOI/arXiv IDs, fuzzy-matching title and authors (difflib SequenceMatcher ratio >=0.70), flagging retractions marked in Crossref (update-to) or OpenAlex (is_retracted), and emitting per-entry JSON verdicts mapped to the AlterLab citation-hallucination taxonomy (TF/PAC/IH/PH/SH). Accepts BibTeX, a DOI/arXiv ID list, or free-form references; degrades gracefully offline by emitting 'unverified' verdicts and never silently passing. Use when the request mentions verify citations, check references, fabricated or hallucinated references, fake DOI, retraction check, bibliography audit, or reference existence check. Does NOT write or draft papers — for authoring a manuscript (whose citation-check mode inserts citations) prefer alterlab-paper-writer instead. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.
npx skills add https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-citation-verifier
Take alterlab-ieu/alterlab-citation-verifier from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.