Zero-context verification that every bibliographic entry in the paper is real, correctly attributed, and used in a context the cited paper actually supports. Uses a fresh cross-model reviewer with web/DBLP/arXiv lookup to catch hallucinated authors, wrong years, fabricated venues, version mismatches, and wrong-context citations (cite present but the cited paper does not establish the claim). Use when user says "审查引用", "check citations", "citation audit", "verify references", "引用核对", or before submission to ensure bibliography integrity.
Zero-context verification that every bibliographic entry in the paper is real, correctly attributed, and used in a context the cited paper actually supports. Uses a fresh cross-model reviewer with web/DBLP/arXiv lookup to catch hallucinated authors, wrong years, fabricated venues, version mismatches, and wrong-context citations (cite present but the cited paper does not establish the claim). Use when user says "审查引用", "check citations", "citation audit", "verify references", "引用核对", or before submission to ensure bibliography integrity.
Verify every \cite{...} in a paper against three independent layers:
Existence — the cited paper actually exists at the claimed arXiv ID / DOI / venue.
Metadata correctness — author names, year, venue, and title match canonical sources (DBLP, arXiv, ACL Anthology, Nature, OpenReview, etc.).
Context appropriateness — the cited paper actually supports the claim it is being used to support in the manuscript.
This skill is the fourth layer of \aris{}'s evidence-and-claim assurance, complementing experiment-audit (code), result-to-claim (science verdict), and paper-claim-audit (numerical claims). Together they form a bottom-up integrity stack from raw evaluation code to manuscript bibliography.
When to Use This Skill
Run before submission. The right gating point is:
After paper-write has produced the LaTeX draft and bib file
After paper-claim-audit has verified numerical claims
Before final paper-compile for submission
Do not run this on a half-written draft — most of the work is in cross-checking each \cite against context, which is wasted on placeholder text.
What This Skill Catches
The dangerous citation problems are not wildly fake citations — those are easy to spot. The dangerous ones are:
Wrong-context citations: real paper, but the cited claim is not what that paper actually establishes (e.g., citing Self-Refine to support "self-feedback produces correlated errors" — Self-Refine actually argues the opposite).
STATE = CITATION_AUDIT.json — Machine-readable verdict ledger consumable by downstream tools.
Workflow
Step 1: Discover bib file and section files
Locate:
references.bib (or paper.bib / similar) under the paper directory
All *.tex files containing \cite{...} calls (typically sec/ or sections/)
If multiple bib files exist, audit each separately.
Step 2: Extract all (cite-key, context) pairs
For each \cite{key1,key2,...} invocation in the paper:
Record the cite key
Record the file + line number
Record the surrounding sentence (≥ 1 full sentence around the cite, for context check)
Output a flat list of (key, file, line, surrounding_sentence) tuples.
Also build the inverse: for each bib entry, the list of all places it is cited.
Save the extracted contexts to paper/.aris/citation-audit/contexts.txt so the reviewer can read it directly. Use the paper-dir-relative path .aris/citation-audit/contexts.txt when recording the file in audited_input_hashes; do not stage under /tmp or other transient locations that the verifier cannot rehash later.
Step 3: Send each entry to fresh cross-model reviewer
For each bib entry, launch a fresh Codex reviewer agent. Do not reuse the same reviewer across entries.
spawn_agent:
model: gpt-5.4
reasoning_effort: xhigh
message: |
You are auditing a bibliographic entry. Use web/DBLP/arXiv search.
## Bib entry
@article{key2024example,
author = {...}, title = {...}, journal = {...}, year = {...}, ...
}
## Where this entry is cited in the paper
[paste extracted contexts]
For this entry, verify:
1. EXISTENCE: does this paper exist at the claimed arXiv ID / DOI / venue?
Output: YES / NO / UNCERTAIN, with the verifying URL.
2. METADATA: are author names, year, venue, title correct?
For each, output: correct / wrong: should be ... / typo: ...
3. CONTEXT: for each use, does the cited paper actually support the surrounding claim?
Output per-use: SUPPORTS / WEAK / WRONG, with one-sentence reasoning.
VERDICT: KEEP / FIX / REPLACE / REMOVE
- KEEP: entry is clean, all uses are appropriate
- FIX: metadata needs correction; uses are appropriate
- REPLACE: cite is wrong-context, find a different paper that actually supports the claim
- REMOVE: entry is hallucinated or unsupportable
Be honest. If you cannot verify online, say UNCERTAIN; do not guess.
Save the response to .aris/traces/citation-audit/<date>_runNN/<key>.md per the review-tracing protocol.
Step 4: Aggregate verdicts
Build CITATION_AUDIT.json following the schema defined in "Submission
Artifact Emission" below (single authoritative schema for this file).
Per-entry ledger data goes under details.per_entry, not under a
top-level entries field. The top-level verdict is a single overall
value (PASS / WARN / FAIL / NOT_APPLICABLE / BLOCKED / ERROR) derived
from per-entry verdicts per the decision table in "Submission Artifact
Emission"; the top-level summary is a one-line human-readable string.
Concretely, details carries the per-entry ledger:
"details":{"total_entries":29,"counts":{"KEEP":11,"FIX":14,"REPLACE":3,"REMOVE":1},"per_entry":[{"key":"lu2024aiscientist","verdict":"KEEP","axis_failures":[],"uses":[{"file":"sections/1.intro.tex","line":11,"verdict":"SUPPORTS"},{"file":"sections/6.related.tex","line":8,"verdict":"SUPPORTS"}]},{"key":"madaan2023selfrefine","verdict":"FIX","axis_failures":["CONTEXT"],"uses":[{"file":"sections/2.overview.tex","line":42,"verdict":"WRONG","note":"Self-Refine demonstrates iterative improvement, not correlated errors"},{"file":"sections/6.related.tex","line":13,"verdict":"SUPPORTS"}]}]}
See "Submission Artifact Emission" for the full artifact (top-level
fields audit_skill, verdict, reason_code, summary,
audited_input_hashes, trace_path, thread_id, reviewer_model,
reviewer_reasoning, generated_at, details).
Step 5: Generate human-readable report
Write CITATION_AUDIT.md:
# Citation Audit Report**Date**: 2026-04-19
**Bib file**: references.bib
**Total entries**: 29
## Summary
| Verdict | Count |
|---------|------|
| KEEP | 11 |
| FIX | 14 |
| REPLACE | 3 |
| REMOVE | 1 |
## Priority Fixes (CRITICAL — apply before submission)### REMOVE: hidden2025aiscientistpitfalls- Author listed as "Anonymous" — actual authors are Luo, Kasirzadeh, Shah
- Title is incomplete
- ACTION: Replace key with `luo2025aiscientistpitfalls`, update authors and title
### REPLACE-CONTEXT: madaan2023selfrefine in sec/2.overview.tex:42- Cited to support: "single-model self-refinement can produce correlated errors"
- Self-Refine paper actually demonstrates iterative IMPROVEMENT, not correlated errors
- ACTION: Rewrite the sentence; cite Self-Refine for "self-feedback loop" framing instead
[... continues for each entry ...]
## All-Clean Entries (no action needed)
[list of KEEP keys]
Step 6: Apply fixes (interactive)
For each FIX/REPLACE/REMOVE verdict, prompt the user:
If AUTO_APPLY = true, apply all FIX-level changes (metadata corrections only). REPLACE and REMOVE always require human approval — they involve content changes.
Page count unchanged or only minimally affected by metadata fixes
Key Rules
Fresh reviewer thread per audit run — never reuse prior review context
Web access required — the reviewer must do real lookups, not memory pattern-match
Wrong-context > metadata — a real paper used to support a wrong claim is more dangerous than a typo in author name
REPLACE/REMOVE require human approval — never auto-modify content claims
Always emit, never block — this skill always writes CITATION_AUDIT.json with a verdict; the decision to block finalization lives in paper-writing Phase 6 + tools/verify_paper_audits.sh, driven by the assurance level. See "Submission Artifact Emission" below.
Run once per submission — the audit is wall-clock expensive (web lookups for each entry); not for every save
Together: code → result → numerical claim → cited claim. Each layer has cross-family review with no executor in the validator path.
Known Limitations
DBLP coverage gap: very recent papers (< 2 weeks) may not yet be in DBLP. Reviewer should fall back to arXiv.
Pre-print vs published: when both exist, reviewer should prefer the published venue (ICML 2024 over arXiv 2401.xxxxx) but flag both.
Anthology vs OpenReview: NeurIPS/ICLR papers have OpenReview entries before official proceedings; both are valid sources.
Multi-author truncation: bib entries with 6+ authors using and others are conventional and not flagged unless the truncation hides a co-author the user explicitly cares about.
Review Tracing
After each reviewer agent call, save the trace following shared-references/review-tracing.md. Use tools/save_trace.sh or write files directly to .aris/traces/citation-audit/<date>_run<NN>/. Respect the --- trace: parameter (default: full).
Output Contract
CITATION_AUDIT.md (human-readable report) at paper root
CITATION_AUDIT.json (machine-readable ledger; schema below) at paper root
Optional: applied fixes to references.bib + sec/*.tex (with --apply flag)
Submission Artifact Emission
This skill always writes paper/CITATION_AUDIT.json, regardless of
caller or detector outcome. A paper with no .bib file or no \cite{...}
usage emits verdict NOT_APPLICABLE; silent skip is forbidden.
paper-writing Phase 6 and tools/verify_paper_audits.sh both rely on
this artifact existing at a predictable path.
The artifact conforms to the schema in shared-references/assurance-contract.md:
Hash the declared input set actually passed to this audit: the .bib
file, main.tex, and every sections/*.tex file that supplied citation
contexts. Do NOT hash extracted contexts from /tmp or other transient
paths — if you need to stage extracted contexts, materialize them under
paper/.aris/ so the verifier can rehash reproducibly. Do NOT hash
repo-wide unions or the reviewer's self-reported opened subset.
Path convention (must match tools/verify_paper_audits.sh): keys are
paths relative to the paper directory (no paper/ prefix — the
verifier already resolves relative to the paper dir; prefixing produces
paper/paper/... and false-fails as STALE). Use absolute paths for
any file outside the paper dir.
Verdict decision table
Input state
Verdict
reason_code example
No .bib file or no \cite{...} usage
NOT_APPLICABLE
no_citations
.bib file referenced but unreadable / missing
BLOCKED
bib_unreadable
Every entry KEEP, all three axes green
PASS
all_entries_keep
Only FIX verdicts (metadata drift, no context errors)
WARN
metadata_drift
Any REPLACE or REMOVE (wrong-context or hallucinated entry)
FAIL
wrong_context
Web lookups timed out / reviewer invocation failed
ERROR
reviewer_error
Thread independence
Every invocation uses a fresh reviewer agent. Never reuse send_input across
different bibliography entries. Do not accept prior audit outputs (PROOF_AUDIT,
PAPER_CLAIM_AUDIT, EXPERIMENT_LOG) as input — the fresh thread preserves
reviewer independence per shared-references/reviewer-independence.md.
This skill never blocks by itself; paper-writing Phase 6 plus the
verifier decide whether the verdict blocks finalization based on the
assurance level.
See Also
/paper-claim-audit — sibling skill for numerical claim verification
/experiment-audit — sibling skill for evaluation code integrity
/result-to-claim — claim verdict assignment from results
shared-references/citation-discipline.md — protocol document for citation hygiene
