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)

Warn (needs review)

Fail (must fix)

Operations

Citation Key Format

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

Examples:

• Vaswani2017Attention
• Sutskever2014Sequence
• Brown2020Language

Academic Database Priority

When searching for papers:

1. DBLP - CS papers, canonical BibTeX
2. arXiv - Preprints, version history
3. DOI.org - Direct lookup if DOI known
4. 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: