citations

Check that the passages you quote actually appear in the sources you cite, and keep a library of the ones that do.

Install

pip install citations

Quick start

citations init
citations verify --claims claims/

2,940 quotes

  found         2,940
  not found         0

warnings
      213  short — the source may qualify this in the next clause
      155  normalized — matched after ignoring punctuation and spacing

all found.

Commands

Command	What it does
`citations init`	Create a library here
`citations verify`	Do the quotations resolve in their sources?
`citations resolve`	Backfill missing DOIs and arXiv ids
`citations build`	Rebuild records from bibliographies
`citations lint`	BibTeX correctness, via papis
`citations link`	Point pdfs/ at the papers' artifacts

Verify output

Three results, and they are exhaustive:

Result	Meaning
`found`	The passage is in the source
`not found`	The source was read and the passage is not in it
`unchecked`	The source could not be read, so no measurement was made

Warnings are separate, because a passage can be found and still worth a second look. A quote can be short enough that the next clause changes its meaning — "We trained 50" appears verbatim in a paper whose sentence continues "...and 5 refits each for 12 layered".

unchecked is neither a pass nor a failure. Only not found fails; --strict also fails on unchecked, for CI.

not found means read the source. A mirror-reversed scan or a two-column extraction produces the same signal as a passage that was never there.

Where the library lives

$CITATIONS_HOME             if set
./.citations/ walking up    this project's own, the way git finds .git
the shared library          if you made one with citations init --user
none of those               it tells you to run citations init

Project-local by default, so running the tool inside a paper works on that paper and there is no hidden global state.

What a claim file looks like

One file per source, in the paper's claims/ directory. citations verify --claims claims reads all of them.

source:
  citation: schiffman2026             # the bibkey
  local: reference/schiffman2026.pdf  # what gets read
  sha256: 3f9a…                       # which bytes were read
  extract_cmd: pdftotext

claims:
  orthogonal-cores:
    statement: 'Cores meeting equivalent causal criteria sit at principal angles of 75-90 degrees.'
    quotes:
      - exact: 'and principal angles ranged'
        section: 'body'

statement is yours; exact is theirs. The tool checks the second only, so a statement that overreaches its quote is for review to catch — the command cannot.

Records are YAML

So git diff shows what changed. A binary store cannot show you that a year moved from 2021 to 2022 — a real discrepancy this found between two of one author's own papers.

Claude Code

plugin/ is a Claude Code plugin that tells Claude when to reach for the CLI.

/plugin marketplace add elliottower/citations
/plugin install citations@citations

MIT licensed. docs/ has the working practices this came out of.

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