Bibliography Management Skill

Bibliography Management

Curate BibTeX bibliographies with validation against academic databases.

When to Use

Adding a citation for a paper (user knows title/author, needs proper BibTeX)
Validating an existing references.bib file before submission
Building a bibliography for a draft (identify what needs citing)
Cleaning up a messy .bib file (dedup, standardize, fill DOIs)

Don't use for: Quick one-off lookups where you don't need validated BibTeX.

Tool: bibval

bibval validates BibTeX against academic databases:

bibval references.bib              # Validate all entries
bibval references.bib -k key1,key2 # Validate specific entries
bibval references.bib --strict     # Treat warnings as errors

Databases checked: CrossRef, DBLP, ArXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, OpenReview, Zenodo

Issues detected:

Year mismatches
Title differences
Author discrepancies
Missing DOIs

Quality Rubric

Pass (bibliography is healthy)

| Criterion | Requirement | |-----------|-------------| | bibval clean | Exits 0 with no errors | | No duplicates | No duplicate keys or DOIs | | Required fields | All entries have: author, title, year, venue | | DOIs present | DOIs included where available |

Warn (needs review)

| Criterion | Requirement | |-----------|-------------| | Low DOI coverage | >20% entries missing DOIs | | Inconsistent keys | Mix of styles (AuthorYear vs author2024foo) | | Venue inconsistency | Mix of abbreviations (ICML vs Proc. ICML) | | Missing seminal works | Obvious gaps a reviewer would notice |

Fail (must fix)

| Criterion | Requirement | |-----------|-------------| | bibval errors | Year/title/author mismatches | | Placeholder text | TODO, TBD, placeholder in fields | | Broken cross-refs | @string or crossref that doesn't resolve |

Operations

| Operation | Description | |-----------|-------------| | Add | Find BibTeX for a paper, validate, append to file | | Validate | Run bibval on existing file, fix issues | | Curate | Analyze document for citation needs, build bibliography | | Clean | Deduplicate, standardize formatting, fill missing DOIs |

Citation Key Format

Use consistent format: <FirstAuthorLastName><Year><FirstWord>

Examples:

Vaswani2017Attention
Sutskever2014Sequence
Brown2020Language

Academic Database Priority

When searching for papers:

DBLP - CS papers, canonical BibTeX
arXiv - Preprints, version history
DOI.org - Direct lookup if DOI known
Semantic Scholar - Cross-domain, citations

Output Schema

{
  "operation": "add | validate | curate | clean",
  "status": "CLEAN | NEEDS_INPUT | ERRORS",
  "entries_processed": 0,
  "errors": [],
  "warnings": [],
  "changes": []
}

Artifact Location

Bibliography files co-locate with the writing:

project/
├── paper/
│   ├── draft.md
│   ├── references.bib    ← bibliography here
│   └── figures/

Issue Classification

When reviewing bibval output:

| Category | Action | Examples | |----------|--------|----------| | AUTO_FIX | Fix automatically | Year typos, missing DOIs that exist | | VERIFY | Ask user | Title changes, author spelling | | ACCEPT | Leave as-is | Old paper without DOI, acceptable warning |

Agent Skills: Bibliography Management

Skill Files