citation-management

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• find the citation for
• convert this DOI to BibTeX
• verify this reference
• format these citations in APA
• check my bibliography

What it does

citation-management is a Claude Code skill from K-Dense AI’s scientific-agent-skills repo. 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 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.. The canonical SKILL.md lives in the citation-management folder 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.