rseng-citation-hygiene

# Citation hygiene A citation is a checkable claim: this work exists, says what I say it says, and stands unretracted. All three parts fail routinely - and AI assistance has made the first failure mode systematic: language models fabricate plausible references with confident DOIs. An agent that produces or touches citations therefore has a special duty here, stated plainly: VERIFY EVERY CITATION YOU GENERATE against an authoritative source before handing it to the user, and say which were verified. No unverified reference should survive to a published artifact. rseng-citation-metadata covers making YOUR software citable; this skill covers the references you cite. ## Verify existence and metadata (Crossref, OpenAlex) For each reference with a DOI: - Resolve it: `curl -sI https://doi.org/<DOI>` - a failing DOI is either a typo or a fabrication; both are findings. - Fetch the registered metadata and compare with the citation as written: `https://api.crossref.org/works/<DOI>` (or the OpenAlex record at `https://api.openalex.org/works/doi:<DOI>` - open, keyless APIs). Title, authors, venue and year must match; a DOI that resolves to a DIFFERENT paper than the citation claims is the classic fabrication signature and worse than a dead link. - References without DOIs: search Crossref/OpenAlex by title and authors; if nothing plausible exists, flag it - books and grey literature can be legitimate, but only a human can vouch for them. - Batch the work: extract all...