lyndonkl/skills/citation-form-check

Citation Form Check

Table of Contents

• Correct form
• Workflow
• Worked example
• Guardrails

Related skills: Called by Editor in voice pass. Reads shared-context/style-guide.md for the citation template.

Correct form

From style-guide.md:

Papers cited in prose: Author(s), Institution, Year — Title on first mention. Not a bare hyperlink, not a title alone.

Examples of correct:

• "Chen et al., Google, 2024 showed that retrieval beats parametric recall at the tail."
• "Vaswani et al. (Google Brain, 2017) introduced the Transformer architecture."
• "Dao et al., 2022, on FlashAttention demonstrated that memory is O(N), not O(N²)."

Examples to flag:

• "this paper" — bare hyperlink without author + institution.
• "A Google paper said…" — no authors.
• "Attention Is All You Need" (title only) — no authors, no year.
• "Recent research shows…" — no citation at all.

Workflow

Citation check draft D:
- [ ] Step 1: Detect paper references (arXiv patterns, italicized titles, hyperlinks to paper sites, "a paper")
- [ ] Step 2: For each reference, parse surrounding sentence for author + institution
- [ ] Step 3: If author OR institution missing, flag tier-2 (unless it's the second+ mention of a paper already correctly cited once)
- [ ] Step 4: Suggest the correct form

Detection patterns

• arXiv URLs: arxiv.org/abs/\d{4}\.\d{4,5}
• DOIs: 10\.\d+/\S+
• Italicized titles: \*[A-Z][^*]+\* of length ≥3 words (filters out italicized phrases)
• Hyperlinks to paper sites: (arxiv|openreview|papers\.nips|proceedings)
• Generic "a paper" / "recent research" / "a Google paper"

Exemption

If a paper is correctly cited in full on first mention, subsequent mentions can use a short form ("Chen et al. also noted…"). Only first-mention requires full Author, Institution, Year.

Worked example

Draft:

RAG (as shown in this paper) beats fine-tuning for recall.

A Google paper found that retrieval dominates for rare facts.

Attention Is All You Need is the foundational work.

Chen et al., Google, 2024 — "Fine-Tuning or Retrieval?" — compared both approaches; Chen et al. concluded fine-tuning loses on tail knowledge.

Flags:

1. (Tier-2) "this paper" — bare hyperlink. Rewrite: "Lewis et al., FAIR, 2020 — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks."
2. (Tier-2) "A Google paper" — no authors. Rewrite: insert authors, year, title.
3. (Tier-2) "Attention Is All You Need" — title only. Rewrite: "Vaswani et al., Google Brain, 2017 — Attention Is All You Need."
4. (PASS) Chen et al. citation is correct on first mention; second mention (short form) is acceptable.

Guardrails

1. Citation form is tier-2. The writer can publish with a bare hyperlink; it's a craft miss, not a voice violation.
2. Don't flag mentions of blogs, tools, or GitHub projects — only formal research citations.
3. First mention rule: full form required. Subsequent mentions can be short.
4. If the writer uses a different citation template (e.g., footnote-based), respect the style-guide.
5. Never rewrite a citation without the writer's confirmation — suggest only.
6. Don't flag citations the writer explicitly annotates [short] in their draft (convention for intentional short-form on first mention).

Quick reference

• Input: draft + style-guide.md.
• Output: citation flags with tier-2 severity.
• First mention = full form; subsequent mentions = short form.