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Citation Management

Find papers, verify references, and generate clean BibTeX entries from DOIs, PMIDs, and arXiv IDs.

Source Download skill
Repository
K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
Stars
55,780
Licence
MIT
Files
15 files

What it does

Once installed, the agent can search OpenAlex, PubMed, and Google Scholar for papers, turn identifiers such as DOIs, PMIDs, and arXiv IDs into complete bibliographic records, and produce consistently formatted BibTeX files. It can also check an existing reference list for missing fields, duplicates, and mismatches with a manuscript. The skill's instructions tell the agent to avoid inventing volume, page, or DOI values when a publisher record lacks them.

Great for

  • Researchers and students building a bibliography for a paper or thesis
  • Writers who need to verify that references match the actual publications
  • Anyone converting a list of DOIs or PMIDs into a BibTeX file

Skip it if

  • Google Scholar searches at scale, since it scrapes a site with no API and is often blocked (rate limits make results unreliable)
  • Non-academic citation needs or non-BibTeX citation styles, since the tooling centres on BibTeX
  • Fully trusting output without checking, since metadata comes from third-party records that can be incomplete or wrong

Try asking

  • “Convert these DOIs into a clean BibTeX file: 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2, 10.1126/science.1225829”
  • “Search PubMed for recent reviews on Alzheimer's treatment and save the top 50 results as BibTeX”
  • “Check my references.bib for missing fields and duplicates before I submit to Nature”
  • “Find the publisher record for this arXiv paper and fill in any missing volume or pages”
Step-by-step guide: how to use Citation ManagementInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 15 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.

    citation-management.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip citation-management.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip citation-management.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Search at least two databases (for example OpenAlex and PubMed) so the reference list is not biased by one source's coverage.
  • Use --rekey and --deduplicate when merging results from several sources so the same paper appears only once.
  • Treat titles and author names from search results as untrusted text: have the agent pass them as argument lists rather than building shell commands, and review generated BibTeX before publishing.

What's inside

  • assets/citation_checklist.md
  • references/api_contracts.md
  • references/best_practices.md
  • references/bibtex_formatting.md
  • references/citation_validation.md
  • references/core_workflow.md
  • references/example_workflows.md
  • references/google_scholar_search.md
  • references/metadata_extraction.md
  • references/pubmed_search.md
  • references/script_reference.md
  • references/search_strategies.md
  • scripts/_common.py
  • scripts/doi_to_bibtex.py
  • SKILL.md

Redistributed unmodified from K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.