# citation-management

> Comprehensive citation management for academic research: search Google Scholar and PubMed, extract accurate metadata, validate citations, and generate properly formatted BibTeX entries for finding papers, verifying citation information, and converting DOIs.

**Use case**: Find, verify, and format academic citations accurately

**Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/citation-management/

**Topics**: claude-code, skills, science, scientific-writing

**Trigger phrases**: "find the citation for", "convert this DOI to BibTeX", "verify this reference", "format these citations in APA", "check my bibliography"

**Source**: [K-Dense AI](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/citation-management)

**License**: MIT

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## What it does

`citation-management` is a Claude Code skill from K-Dense AI's [scientific-agent-skills repo](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills). It turns Claude into a citation librarian that searches Google Scholar and PubMed, extracts accurate metadata from paper records, validates that citations match the actual source, and outputs properly formatted BibTeX entries or inline citations in the target style.

A session produces verified citations — not hallucinated ones. The skill fetches live metadata from databases rather than generating citation fields from memory, which eliminates the most common failure mode of AI-assisted scientific writing.

## When to use it

Reach for it when:

- You have a partial reference (author name + year, or a title fragment) and need the full verified citation
- You have a DOI or PMID and need a formatted BibTeX entry or inline citation
- You suspect a citation in your draft is inaccurate and want to verify it against the source

When *not* to reach for it:

- You need to interact with your Zotero library programmatically — use `pyzotero`
- You need to search for papers on a broad topic — use `paper-lookup` or `literature-review`

## Install

Copy the `SKILL.md` from K-Dense AI's [citation-management folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/citation-management) into `.claude/skills/citation-management/` in your project.

Trigger phrases: "find the citation for", "convert this DOI to BibTeX", "verify this reference", "format these citations in APA".

## What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. **Input intake.** Provide the DOI, PMID, partial reference, or paper title. Multiple citations can be processed in a batch.
2. **Live metadata retrieval.** Claude queries Google Scholar and/or PubMed to fetch authoritative metadata — title, authors, journal, volume, pages, year, DOI.
3. **Output formatting.** Citations are returned in the requested format: BibTeX for LaTeX workflows, APA/Vancouver/Nature/IEEE for manuscript insertion, or a validated reference list ready to paste.

## Receipts

**Where it works well:**
- DOI-to-BibTeX conversion for journal articles — metadata retrieval is clean and the output is copy-paste ready for LaTeX
- Catching malformed citations where author order, year, or page numbers don't match the actual record

**Where it backfires:**
- Conference proceedings and book chapters with incomplete database coverage — some metadata fields come back empty
- Very recent preprints not yet indexed in PubMed or Scholar may not resolve cleanly

**Pattern that works:** run the full bibliography through citation-management at the end of a writing session rather than one-by-one during drafting; batch verification is faster and catches inconsistencies across the reference list.

## Source and attribution

Originally authored by [K-Dense Inc.](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI). The canonical SKILL.md lives in the [`citation-management` folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/citation-management) of their public scientific-agent-skills repository.

License: MIT. Install, adapt, and redistribute with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner's perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.