/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-6-astra`** — 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