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:

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:

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