Validate bibliography entries against citations in all source files. Find missing entries and unused references. Make sure to use this skill whenever the user has any concern about bibliography completeness or citation keys. Triggers include: "validate my bib", "check my citations", "find missing references", "I'm getting undefined citation errors", "are all my citations in the bib file", "check for unused references", "my bibliography is broken", "missing bib entries", "citation not found", or after adding new references from a lit review or before submission.
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Use validate-bib to validate [bibliography file path] against all manuscript and Quarto citations, reporting missing entries, unused references, likely key typos, and malformed bibliography fields.
Required inputs
[bibliography file path]
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SKILL.md
name: validate-bibdescription: >- Validate bibliography entries against citations in all source files. Find missing entries and unused references. Make sure to use this skill whenever the user has any concern about bibliography completeness or citation keys. Triggers include: "validate my bib", "check my citations", "find missing references", "I'm getting undefined citation errors", "are all my citations in the bib file", "check for unused references", "my bibliography is broken", "missing bib entries", "citation not found", or after adding new references from a lit review or before submission.argument-hint: "[bib file path, or leave blank to auto-detect]"allowed-tools: ["Read", "Grep", "Glob"]
Validate Bibliography
Cross-reference all citations in source files against bibliography entries.
Steps
Read the bibliography file and extract all citation keys
Scan all source files for citation keys:
.tex files: look for \cite{, \citet{, \citep{, \citeauthor{, \citeyear{
.qmd files: look for @key, [@key], [@key1; @key2]
Extract all unique citation keys used
Cross-reference:
Missing entries: Citations used in source files but NOT in bibliography
Unused entries: Entries in bibliography not cited anywhere