This skill provides reference guidance for citation verification in academic writing. Use when the user asks about "citation verification best practices", "how to verify references", "preventing fake citations", or needs guidance on citation accuracy. This skill supports ml-paper-writing by providing detailed verification principles and common error patterns.
A reference guide for citation verification in academic paper writing, providing verification principles and best practices.
Core Principle: Proactively verify every citation during the writing process using WebSearch and Google Scholar.
Citation issues in academic papers seriously impact research integrity:
These issues can lead to:
Special risk with AI-assisted writing: AI-generated citations have approximately 40% error rate; every citation must be verified via WebSearch.
This skill provides verification principles based on WebSearch and Google Scholar:
Core idea: Verify immediately when adding a citation, rather than checking after writing is complete.
Why Google Scholar:
Verification steps:
"site:scholar.google.com [paper title] [first author]"Information that must match:
Key principle: When citing a specific claim, you must confirm the claim actually appears in the paper.
Need a citation during writing
↓
WebSearch to find the paper
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Google Scholar to verify existence
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Confirm paper details
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Get BibTeX
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(If citing a specific claim) Verify the claim
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Add to bibliography
Key point: Verification is part of the writing process, not a separate post-processing step.
The verification principles of this skill are integrated into the Citation Workflow of the ml-paper-writing skill.
Auto-trigger: Citation verification is automatically executed when writing papers with the ml-paper-writing skill.
Manual reference: Refer to this skill when you need detailed verification principles.
Scenario: Need to cite the Transformer paper
Step 1: WebSearch lookup
Query: "Attention is All You Need Vaswani 2017"
Result: Found multiple sources for the paper
Step 2: Google Scholar verification
Query: "site:scholar.google.com Attention is All You Need Vaswani"
Result: ✅ Paper exists, 50,000+ citations, NeurIPS 2017
Step 3: Confirm details
- Title: "Attention is All You Need"
- Authors: Vaswani, Ashish; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; ...
- Year: 2017
- Venue: NeurIPS (NIPS)
Step 4: Get BibTeX
- Click "Cite" on Google Scholar
- Select BibTeX format
- Copy BibTeX entry
Step 5: Add to bibliography
- Paste into .bib file
- Use \cite{vaswani2017attention} in the paper
If the paper cannot be found on Google Scholar:
[CITATION NEEDED] markerIf information doesn't match:
[CITATION NEEDED] to mark explicitly❌ Wrong approach:
✅ Correct approach:
Core Principle: Proactively verify every citation during the writing process using WebSearch and Google Scholar.
Key Steps:
Failure handling: When verification fails, mark as [CITATION NEEDED] and clearly notify the user.
Integration: The principles of this skill are integrated into the ml-paper-writing skill for automatic verification.