Citations: BibTeX generation and reference verification

Turn a paper into a correct BibTeX entry, and prove an existing entry is real and accurate. A strong model still fabricates references and swaps authors, venues, and years between real papers, so the verification here is a mechanical check, not a matter of care.

Metadata comes from the Zotero library over the MCP connection (configured in .mcp.json), which pulls from CrossRef and arXiv. Web search is the fallback. The old skill's hand-scraping of Google Scholar, CrossRef, arXiv, and DBLP web pages is gone; do not reconstruct it.

Output discipline (read first)

1. Always ship the best available entry. If Zotero is not reachable, the network is down, or it is a one-off conversion, do not defer to "run this later." Produce the BibTeX from the metadata you already have, then say which fields still need confirming.
2. Label what you could not verify. Any field you did not confirm against an authoritative source (a guessed page range, an unresolved DOI) gets marked inline once, e.g. pages = {1--?}, % UNVERIFIED. Never invent a value; never withhold the whole entry because one field is unknown.
3. State an unknown field once, cleanly. Either give the value with a % UNVERIFIED marker, or omit it with one note that it needs lookup. Do not assert a value and retract it in the same breath.
4. Keep the machinery out of the output. Deliver citations, not a tour of this skill. Do not name the skill, its rules, or its scripts as the reason for what you do.
5. Confirm before any destructive .bib edit. Dedup, auto-fix, and anything that overwrites the user's .bib write to a new file by default (--output clean.bib). When dedup or auto-fix would drop entries or pick a "best" version, show what will be removed and which stays, and ask before applying. The original stays untouched until the user approves.

Getting a citation: Zotero first, web search fallback

Work down this ladder. Stop at the first rung that yields the entry.