Academic Citation Manager

Academic Citation Manager

Manage academic citations across multiple formats (BibTeX, APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago, Vancouver, IEEE) with automated retrieval from DOIs, conversion between formats, deduplication, and validation. This skill handles the complete citation lifecycle from initial capture through final manuscript formatting.

Overview

Citation management is a persistent friction point in academic writing. Researchers collect references from multiple sources (databases, PDFs, colleagues, web pages), store them in different formats, and must output them in the specific style required by each target journal. Errors in citations -- misspelled author names, incorrect years, broken DOIs, inconsistent formatting -- are among the most common reasons for desk rejection and reviewer criticism.

This skill provides a comprehensive citation management workflow that goes beyond what GUI reference managers offer. It can retrieve complete metadata from a DOI in seconds, convert between any citation format, detect and merge duplicate entries, validate entries against CrossRef and OpenAlex databases, and generate properly formatted bibliographies for any major citation style.

The approach is text-based and scriptable, making it ideal for integration with LaTeX workflows, Markdown writing pipelines, and automated document generation. All citation data is stored in standard BibTeX format as the canonical source, with on-demand conversion to other formats for specific manuscript requirements.

Citation Retrieval

From DOI

import requests

def get_bibtex_from_doi(doi):
    """Retrieve BibTeX entry from a DOI via CrossRef."""
    url = f"https://doi.org/{doi}"
    headers = {"Accept": "application/x-bibtex"}
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, allow_redirects=True)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        return response.text
    return None

# Example
bibtex = get_bibtex_from_doi("10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2")
print(bibtex)
# @article{Jumper_2021,
#   title={Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold},
#   author={Jumper, John and Evans, Richard and ...},
#   journal={Nature},
#   volume={596},
#   pages={583--589},
#   year={2021},
#   publisher={Springer}
# }