lit-anchor

Every citation is a claim that a specific work exists and says a specific thing. AI assistants produce plausible-but-fabricated references — real-looking DOIs that resolve to nothing, or to a different paper; correct-sounding titles with invented authors or years. A bulk "give me twenty references" response is a draft to verify, never a result. This skill is the discipline that keeps a fabricated citation out of your paper.

When to use

• Assembling or extending a bibliography / related-work section.
• Adding a single citation to support a claim.
• Making a novelty or absence claim ("no prior work does X", "we are the first to…").
• Any moment an AI hands you a formatted, confident-looking citation.

When NOT to use

• Summarizing or reasoning about a paper you already hold — that is reading, not sourcing.
• Internal cross-references to your own artifacts (use layer-sync / decision-log).

Runbook

1. Treat every AI-produced identifier as a hypothesis. A DOI, title, author list, year, or venue emitted by a model is unverified until resolved against an authoritative source.
2. Verify one citation at a time. Resolve each DOI/URL against a real source (the DOI resolver, the publisher page, an indexed search) and confirm title + authors + year + venue all match. Do not batch — batching is where fabrications hide.
3. Main agent synthesizes; sub-agents fetch small pieces. Never delegate "produce the verified bibliography" to a sub-agent that returns a finished, verified-looking table — that is exactly the pattern that launders fabrications. Sub-agents retrieve single documents; the main agent assembles and vouches.
4. Mark unverified and abstract-only sources explicitly. An abstract-only source carries a documented "full text before submission" debt; an unresolved citation is flagged, never silently included.
5. Back absence claims with a documented search. "No prior work does X" requires the actual queries run and their date recorded — not a model's confidence.

Rules

1. No fabricated identifiers. Every DOI/URL in the record resolves to the exact claimed work.
2. Bulk AI citation output is a draft. It enters the record only after per-item verification.
3. Every citation carries provenance: where it was verified and the as-of date; trained knowledge about a paper is a hypothesis about the present, not an observation.
4. Absence/novelty claims are search-backed, with the search recorded.
5. A citation that will not resolve after a documented search is dropped or flagged — never quietly kept because it "looks right".

Configuration

• {{bibliography}} — where verified citations live (e.g. docs/references.bib, a notes file).
• {{claim_log}} — optional: where novelty/absence claims and their backing searches are recorded.

Provenance & maintenance

Generalized from a working computational-research repository's DOI-verification protocol, adopted after a bulk literature-review sub-agent was caught emitting fabricated references: the fix was small-step manual retrieval with one-by-one resolution and main-agent synthesis, plus an explicit abstract-only debt on sources not yet read in full. See the pack's examples/ directory for the worked exemplar mapping.

Re-verify in your project:

• Resolve every identifier in {{bibliography}} and confirm the resolved metadata matches the entry (a stale or redirected DOI is a silent corruption).
• Confirm each novelty/absence claim in {{claim_log}} still has its backing search recorded.