Infrastructure Reference

Reference Module

Bibliographic-reference workflows for the template's two-layer architecture. Output is byte-compatible with the existing `projects/templates/template_code_project/manuscript/references.bib` format and round-trips through the parser without semantic loss.

citation — BibTeX read/write/convert

from infrastructure.reference.citation import (
    BibEntry, BibDatabase,
    parse_bibfile, parse_bibtex, BibParseError,
    render_entry, render_database, render_entries, write_bibfile,
    paper_to_bibentry, generate_citation_key,
    escape_latex, unescape_latex,
)

Read & validate an existing .bib

db = parse_bibfile("projects/templates/template_code_project/manuscript/references.bib")
print(len(db), "entries")
boyd = db.find("boyd2004convex")
assert boyd.entry_type == "article"
assert boyd.get("author") == "Boyd, Stephen and Vandenberghe, Lieven"

Build entries programmatically

from collections import OrderedDict
entry = BibEntry(
    entry_type="article",
    citation_key="smith2024example",
    fields=OrderedDict([
        ("title", "An Example Paper"),
        ("author", "Smith, Alice and Jones, Bob"),
        ("journal", "Cambridge UP"),
        ("year", "2024"),
        ("pages", "1-10"),  # auto-normalised to "1--10"
        ("doi", "10.1234/example"),
    ]),
)
print(render_entry(entry))

Output (matches the exemplar exactly):

@article{smith2024example,
  title={An Example Paper},
  author={Smith, Alice and Jones, Bob},
  journal={Cambridge UP},
  year={2024},
  pages={1--10},
  doi={10.1234/example}
}

Convert a literature search result to BibTeX

from infrastructure.search.literature import LiteratureClient, SearchQuery, ArxivBackend
from infrastructure.reference.citation import paper_to_bibentry, render_database
from infrastructure.reference.citation.models import BibDatabase

result = LiteratureClient([ArxivBackend()]).search(SearchQuery(text="adam optimizer"))
db = BibDatabase()
for paper in result.papers:
    db.add(paper_to_bibentry(paper))
write_bibfile("output/references.bib", db)

Validate / format from the CLI

# Round-trip-parse a .bib file.
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.citation.cli validate \
    projects/templates/template_code_project/manuscript/references.bib

# Re-emit a .bib in canonical format (overwrites in place).
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.citation.cli format path/to/refs.bib

# Convert a JSON file of literature-search Paper records into BibTeX.
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.citation.cli convert \
    output/papers.json output/references.bib

verification — reference-existence anti-hallucination gate

Resolves each cited reference against Crossref → OpenAlex (DOI), arXiv (id), or Crossref title search, and classifies it ok / mismatch / fabricated / unverifiable / unchecked / anachronism. Offline-first (consults only the persistent SQLite cache unless allow_network=True); reports unchecked on an offline cache miss so a skipped check never reads as clean.

from infrastructure.reference.verification import (
    ReferenceResolver, ResolutionCache, verify_bibfile, verify_database, verify_entry,
    VerificationStatus, VerificationReport, ReferenceVerdict, BLOCKING_STATUSES,
)

resolver = ReferenceResolver(cache=ResolutionCache("cache.db"), allow_network=True)
report = verify_bibfile("references.bib", resolver, as_of_year=2026)
print(report.summary_line())
assert not report.has_blocking  # no fabricated / mismatch / anachronism

# Offline (cache-only, CI-safe) vs live resolution; gate on blocking verdicts.
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.verification verify references.bib
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.verification verify references.bib --live --as-of-year 2026 --fail-on-issues
uv run python -m infrastructure.reference.verification cache-clear

See [verification/SKILL.md](verification/SKILL.md) for the full descriptor.

Format Guarantees

• 2-space indent on every field line.
• Trailing comma after every field except the last.
• pages={N--M} (BibTeX em-dash) regardless of input form (-, –, —).
• Author normalisation around and .
• Verbatim fields (year, volume, number, month, edition, isbn,

issn, doi, url) are emitted without LaTeX escaping.

• Unicode is preserved (Pandoc / XeLaTeX handle it natively, matching the

exemplar's convention).

• book / phdthesis / techreport / misc entries never receive a

spurious journal= field even when their source declared a venue.

Related Modules

• [infrastructure.search.literature](../search/literature/SKILL.md) —

discovery side of the literature workflow.

• [infrastructure.publishing.citations](../publishing/SKILL.md) — citation

string generation (APA / MLA) for human-facing markdown sections.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: docxology
• Source: docxology/template
• License: Apache-2.0
• Homepage: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19139090

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.