citation-formatter

name	citation-formatter
description	USE WHEN the user asks to format references for an academic paper or research note. Converts messy DOIs, URLs, or pasted text into APA / IEEE / GB/T 7714 / BibTeX consistently. Verifies the cite key matches the work.

citation-formatter — clean academic citations

Supported formats

Format	When
APA 7	Social sciences, psychology, health
IEEE	Engineering, computer science
GB/T 7714-2015	Chinese academic papers
BibTeX	LaTeX manuscripts
Vancouver	Medicine
Chicago	Humanities

Default to whichever the surrounding document uses. Ask only if the doc has no existing citations.

Source inputs you accept

• DOI: 10.1038/nature12345
• arXiv ID: arXiv:2304.12345
• PubMed ID: PMID: 12345678
• ISBN
• Raw URL (publisher page)
• Loosely formatted text (author / year / title)

For DOI / arXiv / PubMed, prefer to fetch authoritative metadata (WebFetch or MCP fetch) rather than guess. Never invent author lists.

Format templates

APA 7 (journal article)

Lastname, F. M., & Lastname, F. M. (Year). Title. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pp–pp. https://doi.org/...

IEEE (journal article)

[N] F. M. Lastname and F. M. Lastname, "Title," Journal Name, vol. N, no. N, pp. pp–pp, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxx.

GB/T 7714-2015 (期刊文章)

[N] 作者. 题名 [J]. 刊名, 年, 卷(期): 页码.

BibTeX (key generated from first author + year + short title)

@article{lastnameYYYYshorttitle,
  author  = {Lastname, Firstname and Lastname, Firstname},
  title   = {Title of paper},
  journal = {Journal Name},
  volume  = {N},
  number  = {N},
  pages   = {pp--pp},
  year    = {YYYY},
  doi     = {10.xxxx/xxxxx},
}

Quality checks (run before returning)

• All author names in the same name order (Last, First. or First Last)
• Year is 4 digits and plausible (1900–current)
• DOI present where one exists
• Journal name is the official full name (not the colloquial short form), unless the format calls for abbreviation
• Issue/volume/pages present when journal article
• No bracket-soup mixing styles within one list

Bibkey rules (BibTeX)

{firstAuthorLastnameLowercase}{Year}{firstSignificantWordLowercase} — e.g. vaswani2017attention. No accents, no punctuation. Make unique by appending a, b if the same author has multiple in same year.

Output

If asked for many cites, output a single block in the requested format. If the user pasted a mixed bag, group by type (journal / book / web).

Anti-patterns

• Faking author lists when the metadata is incomplete — say "(author list to confirm)" instead
• Mixing two formats in one bibliography
• Auto-shortening journal names without checking the venue's preferred form
• Writing access dates for journal articles (only needed for unstable web resources)