touchneedle

Verifies that the citations in a document are real, accurately described, and consistently used — including the fabricated-citation signature an AI-drafted bibliography produces: a real title carrying the wrong authors, or a plausible reference to a paper that does not exist.

Useful for students and examiners, and for anyone checking a reference list a model wrote.

Quick start

pip install touchneedle
touchneedle check thesis.docx --out report.md

report.md opens with the entries that failed a check, worst first, then the cross-reference pass in both directions. Exit status is 2 when something needs attention and 0 when the list is clean, so the same command drops into CI unchanged.

Nothing is needed beyond Python 3.11+. pandoc has to be on PATH for .docx input, and for nothing else.

Why not a .bib checker

Most commercial citation checkers want a .bib file and check it against academic databases. That covers journal articles but misses standards, specifications, vendor documentation, and blog posts. In a lot of real bibliographies, this is half the list.

So this tool parses a prose reference list straight out of Markdown or .docx, in the four style families a real document uses — author-date (Harvard, APA, Chicago author-date), numeric (IEEE, Vancouver/AMA), MLA, and footnote styles (Chicago notes, MHRA) — and routes each entry to whichever authority can actually confirm it. The style is auto-detected, or forced with --style.

What it checks

Existence and metadata — scripted and deterministic:

Entries with both an identifier and a URL get both, so a real paper behind a dead link is still reported. An entry the retrieved record contradicts comes back as MISMATCH — but only where the record is the cited work by construction, which means an identifier. A title search returns neighbours, so a poor match there is reported as not found, with the closest candidate named, rather than as a disagreement the search is in no position to assert.

Internal consistency — every in-text citation resolves to a list entry, every list entry is cited somewhere, and 2025a/2025b suffixes are used unambiguously. Bracket markers resolve by number, author-page citations by surname, footnote markers through their note — a shortened note or an Ibid. links to the full citation it repeats.

Claim support — the pass that needs reading rather than fetching. claims emits a worklist pairing each in-text citation with the sentence making the claim and a locator for the source, to be ruled SUPPORTED / PARTIAL / UNSUPPORTED / INACCESSIBLE one row at a time. This catches the failure the database checks cannot: a genuine source attached to a claim it does not make. Who does that reading is the subject of Two ways to run it.

What it produces

A Markdown report, worst findings first. From the test fixture, run live:

## Entries needing attention

### STALE — IETF (2025a)

> IETF (2025a) 'The OAuth 2.1 Authorization Framework', Internet-Draft draft-ietf-oauth-v2-1-13.

- cited as -13 but the current revision is -15; an Internet-Draft is a moving
  target, so confirm the cited text survived

### NOT_FOUND — Uncited (2021)

> Uncited, A. (2021) 'A paper that nobody in this document cites', Journal of
> Irreproducible Results. doi:10.1000/uncited.

- Crossref has no record for DOI 10.1000/uncited

## Cross-reference consistency

### In-text citations with no matching reference entry

- `Nonexistent (2019)` — …An orphan citation appears here (Nonexistent, 2019).…

The full report — five entries verified against arXiv, Crossref and the IETF datatracker, one link that has quietly moved, and the cross-reference pass in both directions.

--json writes the same results machine-readably, for a CI step or a dashboard.

Two ways to run it

touchneedle is a command-line program. check is entirely scripted — it fetches records and compares fields, so it returns the same answer every run, with no model involved anywhere in it.

claims is the half the script cannot finish. It emits a worklist: each in-text citation, the sentence that cites it, and a locator for the source. Ruling on those rows means reading the sources, which is a judgement rather than a lookup.

So there are two ways to work that list. Do it yourself, from a terminal. Or run the tool inside a coding agent, which calls the same script for the scripted pass and then reads each source to fill in the second. The agent path is not a different tool and not a wrapper — it is scripts/touchneedle.py either way.

From a terminal

pip install touchneedle

touchneedle check thesis.docx --out report.md --json data.json
touchneedle claims thesis.docx --out claims.md

From a clone, without installing, that is python3 scripts/touchneedle.py … — the same file.

Inside Claude Code

As a skill:

git clone https://github.com/nicoleman0/touchneedle ~/.claude/skills/touchneedle

Or as a plugin:

/plugin marketplace add nicoleman0/touchneedle
/plugin install touchneedle

Either way, ask for it in plain words — "check the citations in thesis.docx" — and the model runs check, reads the report, then works the claims worklist source by source.

Options and exit codes

Both subcommands take the document, and:

check takes five more, all of them about reaching the network:

--mailto is worth more than politeness. OpenAlex rate-limits anonymous search when it is busy, and OpenAlex is the fallback that covers what Crossref does not index — USENIX, NeurIPS, ICLR, most conference proceedings. Without a contact address those entries come back unchecked rather than verified, and the report says so at the top rather than passing them off as clean.

It stays off by default and is never inferred, because it sends an address to third parties. It is also read from CITATION_CHECK_MAILTO.

check exits 2 when something needs attention and 0 when clean. claims always exits 0 — it asks a question rather than answering one.

Statuses

MISMATCH and NOT_FOUND are the ones that damage a submission. LINK_DEAD and STALE need a fix but not a retraction. PARTIAL, LINK_MOVED and UNVERIFIABLE are for a glance — notably, PDFs and JS-rendered pages land in PARTIAL routinely, because no <title> can be read from them. A PARTIAL is a limit of the check, not evidence against the citation.

Limits

Page numbers, edition and publisher details are not checked.

MLA narrative citations that end in a bare page number (Smith argues the point (42)) are not matched, because a bare parenthesised number cannot be told from any other parenthesised digit. A shortened footnote note that cannot be linked to its full citation is kept as an entry with a caveat rather than silently merged.

The list of in-text citations with no matching entry has expected false positives: a regex cannot distinguish (Smith, 2024) from (ICLR 2023), or [12] from a figure reference. The report says which shape to expect per style.

Sources behind paywalls cannot be verified beyond their metadata record.

Development

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -t tests

See CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request.

The short version: standard library only, tests stay offline, and never let a coverage gap report itself as a finding.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.