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validate-bib

Validate bibliography entries against citations in all manuscript files. Find missing entries and unused references.

Published by brycewang-stanford ↗brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills

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validate-bib

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Use validate-bib to validate bibliography entries against citations across the manuscript files in [project path], reporting missing entries, unused references, likely key typos, and entry-quality issues with severity levels.

Required inputs

  • [project path]

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SKILL.md

name: validate-bibdescription: Validate bibliography entries against citations in all manuscript files. Find missing entries and unused references.disable-model-invocation: trueallowed-tools: ["Read", "Grep", "Glob"]

Validate Bibliography

Cross-reference all citations in manuscript files against bibliography entries.

Steps

  1. Read the bibliography file(s): Find .bib files in the project.

  2. Scan manuscript files for citation commands:

    • LaTeX: \cite{}, \citet{}, \citep{}, \citeauthor{}, \citeyear{}
    • Extract all citation keys

  3. Cross-reference:

    • Missing entries (CRITICAL): Citation keys in .tex files without matching .bib entries
    • Unused entries (INFO): .bib entries not cited anywhere
    • Potential typos: Citation keys that look similar to existing entries (edit distance <= 2)

  4. Check entry quality:

    • Required fields present (author, title, year, journal/booktitle)
    • Author formatting consistent
    • Year values reasonable
    • No encoding issues in special characters

  5. Report findings with severity levels.

Notes

  • Missing entries are CRITICAL because they cause compilation warnings.
  • Unused entries are informational -- the user may want to keep them for future use.