citations

# Citations A citation is a claim that a specific document says a specific thing. Language models produce plausible references that do not exist, and reviewers now check. The rule is simple and absolute: nothing enters the bibliography that was not resolved from a live record, and nothing is cited for a claim that was not read. ## Non-negotiables 1. **Resolve before you cite.** Every entry comes from a record fetched now: a DOI at Crossref, a work at OpenAlex, an arXiv id, a PMID. Author names, year, title, venue, pages and DOI are copied from that record, never recalled or completed from memory. 2. **Read before you attribute.** Cite a paper for a finding only after reading the passage (abstract at minimum; the result section for numbers). A title is not evidence of what a paper found. 3. **One canonical identifier per entry.** Prefer the DOI; arXiv id for preprints without one; PMID as a secondary field. The key is `firstauthorYEARkeyword` and is stable once used in the text. 4. **Prefer the published version** over the preprint when both exist, and say so if the text relied on the preprint's numbers. 5. **Never pad.** A claim needs the one or two sources that establish it, not five that mention the topic. 6. **Report what could not be resolved** instead of leaving a best guess in the file. ## Workflow - [ ] Collect the claims that need sources, or the entries to audit. - [ ] Resolve each to a record (`references/apis.md` has the exact requests). - [ ] Read enough of each source to confirm it supports the claim as worded. - [ ] Write the BibTeX from the record; run `scripts/validate_bib.py` on the file. - [ ] Return the list of resolved, corrected and unresolved items. **Resolving.** Search by title first: Crossref `works?query.bibliographic=<title>&rows=3` or OpenAlex `works?search=<title>&per-page=3`; accept a hit only if the title matches closely and the first author agrees. With a DOI in hand, fetch `https://api.crossref.org/works/<doi>` for the authoritative metadata, or `https://doi.org/<doi>` with `Accept: application/x-bibtex` for a ready entry to tidy. For arXiv, `http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?id_list=<id>` returns title, authors and date; check Crossref for a published version of the same title before citing the preprint. For biomedical literature, PubMed E-utilities (`esearch` then `esummary`) give the PMID, DOI and journal. **Auditing an existing .bib.** For every entry: does the DOI resolve, and does the resolved title match the entry's title? Do the authors and year agree? Is the venue the real one? Mark each entry `verified`, `corrected` (write the fix), or `unresolved` (leave the entry, flag it in the report). Duplicates under different keys are merged toward the key used in the text. **Formatting.** Use `@article`, `@inproceedings`, `@misc` (preprints, with `eprint`, `archivePrefix = {arXiv}`, `primaryClass`), `@book`, `@techreport`. Protect capitals in titles with braces only where needed (`{BERT}`, `{Transformer}`). Keep `doi` and `url` fields; drop `abstract` and `keywords`. Sort by key. Let the venue's `.bst` or biblatex style decide the appearance; do not hand-format. ## In-text use - Cite where the claim is made, not at the end of the paragraph. - Distinguish "X showed" (their result) from "see X" (background) from "following X" (method reused). The wording is part of the attribution. - Numbers quoted from a source keep the source's units, precision and conditions; if the text converts them, it says so. - When the same source appears under two names (preprint and published), cite one. ## Before you hand it over - Every `\cite` key exists in the .bib; every .bib entry is cited or removed. - `scripts/validate_bib.py <file>.bib` reports no unresolved DOIs and no title mismatches. - The report to the user lists unresolved items plainly. A manuscript with three honest gaps is better than one with three fabrications.