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reference-check

Category: review
Field: economics
License: private (curator-owned)
Updated: 2026-05-20
Stages: referee-simulation

Curator-private skill — copy text from 100xOS/shared/skills/review/reference-check.md.

Reference Check

Purpose

Validate that every citation in a research paper draft can be traced to a concrete source — either in the project bibliography, the knowledge base, or an external database (CrossRef). Flag missing references so they can be retrieved before submission.

What Makes Well-Cited Work

  1. Every empirical claim about prior work has a citation — no "it is well known that..." without a reference.
  2. Citations match the reference list — no orphan citations (cited but not in references) and no orphan references (in list but never cited).
  3. Author names and years are consistent — "Smith (2020)" in the text matches "Smith, J. (2020)" in the reference list, not "Smith, J. (2019)".
  4. Key methodological choices cite their origin — DiD cites the canonical reference, not just the applied paper that used it.
  5. Self-citations are proportionate — a few are normal, more than 20% of references is a flag.

Common Citation Issues

Issue Example Severity
Orphan citation "Jones (2021)" in text, absent from references Critical
Orphan reference Entry in bibliography never cited in text Major
Year mismatch Text says "(2020)", bib entry says 2019 Major
Author spelling "Mackinlay" vs "MacKinlay" Minor
Missing DOI Reference has no DOI when one exists Major
Incomplete entry Missing journal name or volume Minor

Resolution Strategy

When checking references, resolution proceeds in tiers:

  1. BibTeX match — Does the citation match an entry in the project's bibliography.bib by citation key or author+year?
  2. Knowledge base search — Does a semantic search of the KB return a matching paper?
  3. CrossRef lookup — Can we discover a DOI via the CrossRef API using author + title + year?
  4. Google Scholar fallback — Generate a search URL for manual retrieval.

A citation is "resolved" if any tier succeeds. Unresolved citations are flagged for human retrieval.

DOI Completeness Check

Every resolved reference must have a DOI. After resolving citations:

  1. Check each BibTeX entry for a doi field.
  2. For entries missing DOI, query CrossRef (https://api.crossref.org/works?query.bibliographic=...).
  3. Flag every reference without a DOI as a Major issue.
  4. Only exceptions: pre-DOI books (before ~2000), unpublished manuscripts, and datasets without assigned DOIs. These must have a note field explaining the absence.