bib-verifylisted

# Bibliography Verification & Cleanup ## Why this skill exists Reference lists rot in three ways. First, metadata copied from Google Scholar or arXiv disagrees with the camera-ready version: titles, author lists, venues, and years all drift between preprint and publication (e.g., arXiv's "Fixing Weight Decay Regularization in Adam" became ICLR 2019's "Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization"). Second, LLM-drafted text invents plausible-looking papers that do not exist. Third, entries accumulate noise (pages, publishers, addresses, full venue names) that the house style deliberately omits. The remedy is always the same: verify every entry against authoritative sources, prefer the published version, and reformat to the minimal house style described in `references/conventions.md`. ## Source-of-truth hierarchy 1. **Published version** (conference proceedings or journal). Camera-ready metadata wins over any preprint: if title or authors changed between arXiv and the proceedings, the proceedings version is correct. 2. **arXiv** for papers never formally published → `@preprint`. 3. A reference that cannot be found on DBLP, Crossref, arXiv, or the open web is presumed hallucinated → flag it, never delete it. Lookup sources, in order of usefulness for CS/ML: - **DBLP** — best for computer science. It lists the arXiv version (`"Informal and Other Publications"`) *alongside* conference/journal versions of the same paper, so one query answers "does a published version exist?" - **Cro