citation-audit

--- name: citation-audit description: "Zero-context verification that every bibliographic entry in the paper is real, correctly attributed, and used in a context the cited paper actually supports — catching hallucinated authors, wrong years, fabricated venues, version mismatches, and wrong-context citations. 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." argument-hint: "[paper-directory-or-bib-file] [--uncited] [— soft-only]" allowed-tools: Bash(*), Read, Grep, Glob, Edit, Write, mcp__codex__codex, WebSearch, WebFetch ---

# Citation Audit

> 🔒 **Do not wrap this skill in `/loop`, `/schedule`, or `CronCreate`.** It is > verdict-bearing — it judges bibliographic correctness. Re-running that verdict > on a timer adds no new signal (it changes only when the *bibliography* > changes). Schedule the *external wait that precedes it* — bibliography > finalized → then audit **once**. See > [`shared-references/external-cadence.md`](../shared-references/external-cadence.md).

Verify every `\cite{...}` in a paper against three independent layers:

1. **Existence** — the cited paper actually exists at the claimed arXiv ID / DOI / venue. 2. **Metadata correctness** — author names, year, venue, and title match canonical sources (DBLP, arXiv, ACL Anthology, Nature, OpenReview, etc.). 3. **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). - **Author hallucinations**: anonymous-author placeholders that slipped through, missing co-authors, wrong order. - **Title drift**: arXiv v1 vs v3 with different titles silently merged. - **Venue confusion**: arXiv preprint cited but the official venue is now CVPR/ICML/NeurIPS — using the wrong record. - **Year mismatch**: arXiv 2023 preprint with 2024 conference acceptance, year reported inconsistently. - **Phantom DOIs**: DOI looks real but does not resolve. - **Self-citation drift**: your own prior work cited with year off by one.

## Constants

- **REVIEWER_MODEL = `gpt-5.6-sol`** — Used via Codex MCP. Default for cross-model review with web access. - **CONTEXT_POLICY = `fresh`** — Each audit run uses a new reviewer thread (REVIEWER_BIAS_GUARD). Never `codex-reply`. - **WEB_SEARCH = required** — The reviewer must perform real web/DBLP/arXiv lookups, not pattern-match from memory. - **OUTPUT = `CITATION_AUDIT.md`** — Human-readable per-entry verdict report. - **STATE = `CITATION_AUDIT.json`** — Machine-readable verdict ledger consumable by downstream tools. - **SOFT_ONLY = `false`** — When true (set via `— soft-only` / `— soft_only` flag), the audit runs all three layers normally but **forbids any `.bib` file mutation**. Findings that would otherwise mutate the bib (FIX / REPLACE / REMOVE) are translated into per-occurrence sentence-rewrite proposals against the citing `*.tex` files. Used by `/resubmit-pipeline` Phase 1 to honor the user's hard "freeze the bib" constraint. - **RENDER_HTML = true** — When `true` (default), auto-render `CITATION_AUDIT.md` to HTML after writing the report. Uses **full Codex review gate** (audit-class artifact — render-fidelity check matches the skill's cross-model audit invariant). Set `false` to skip, or pass `— render html: false`.

## 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.

Define two protocol sets used throughout the rest of the workflow: `cited_keys` is the set of unique cite keys appearing in any `\cite{...}` invocation across the audited `*.tex` files (de-duplicated), and `bib_keys` is the set of keys parsed from the audited bib file(s). `cited_keys` drives Step 3 (audit only cited entries); `bib_keys \ cited_keys` is the uncited residual surfaced by the `--uncited` opt-in.

If the user passed `--uncited`, also compute the set difference `bib_keys \ cited_keys` here and stash it for use in Steps 5 and the JSON aggregation; see "Uncited Entry Detection (opt-in)" below for the protocol. The set-diff is a string operation only and does not consume reviewer budget.

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 **cited** bib entry — i.e., each key in `cited_keys` with at least one extracted citation context — invoke `mcp__codex__codex` (NOT `codex-reply` — fresh thread per entry, or batch with explicit per-entry isolation). Do **not** send entries in `bib_keys \ cited_keys` to the reviewer; those are detect-only and surface only when `--uncited` is explicitly enabled (see "Uncited Entry Detection" below).

``` mcp__codex__codex: model: gpt-5.6-sol config: {"model_reasoning_effort": "xhigh"} sandbox: read-only prompt: | 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:

```json "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`:

```markdown # Citation Audit Report

**Date**: 2026-04-19 **Bib file(s)**: references.bib **Total entries**: 29

## Summary | Verdict | Count | |---------|------| | KEEP | 11 | | FIX | 14 | | REPLACE | 3 | | REMOVE | 1 |

## Priority Fixes (CRITICAL — apply before submission)

### REMOVE: anon2025placeholder - Author listed as "Anonymous" — canonical record exists with real authors and full title - Title is incomplete - ACTION: Replace key with the canonical citekey, update authors and title

### REPLACE-CONTEXT: example2023priorwork in sec/2.overview.tex:42 - Cited to support a specific technical claim - The cited paper actually demonstrates a different (related but distinct) phenomenon - ACTION: Rewrite the sentence; cite the prior work for what it actually establishes

[... continues for each entry ...]

## All-Clean Entries (no action needed)

[list of KEEP keys] ```

When `--uncited` is set, append the following section after "All-Clean Entries":

```markdown ## Uncited Entries (opt-in)

The following bib entries are present in the audited bib file(s) but are not referenced by any `\cite{...}` in the paper body:

- `author2010example` — suggestion: prune (uncited; no local evidence of intent) - `someone2015othercite` — suggestion: prune (uncited; no local evidence of intent) - `third2024todo` — suggestion: check (a `% TODO: cite third2024todo` comment was found in `sections/3.related.tex`)

This section is detect-only; it does not change the top-level verdict. ```

### Step 6: Apply fixes (interactive)

For each FIX/REPLACE/REMOVE verdict, prompt the user:

``` Fix [key]? Change: <description of change> Files affected: references.bib + sec/X.tex:Y [Apply / Skip / Defer] ```

If `AUTO_APPLY = true`, apply all FIX-level changes (metadata corrections only). REPLACE and REMOVE always require human approval — they involve content changes.

### Step 7: Recompile and verify

```bash latexmk -C && latexmk -pdf -interaction=nonstopmode main.tex ```

Confirm: - No new `Citation undefined` warnings - No `Reference undefined` warnings - Page count unchanged or only minimally affected by metadata fixes

## Uncited Entry Detection (opt-in)

**Default**: disabled. Existing users see no behavior change — only `\cite{...}` keys are audited, and bib entries with no `\cite` reference in the manuscript are silent