Citation Assistant Skill Guide

Overview

Citation Assistant is a Claude Code skill that integrates OpenAlex and CrossRef APIs into the coding workflow for instant paper lookup, citation formatting, and reference management. Search for papers by title or keyword, get formatted BibTeX entries, find related works, and insert citations — all without leaving the terminal. Designed for researchers writing papers in LaTeX or Markdown.

Installation

# Add as Claude Code skill
# Copy SKILL.md to your Claude Code skills directory
# Or install via OpenClaw:
openclaw skills install citation-assistant

Core Features

Paper Search

import requests

OA_API = "https://api.openalex.org"

def search_papers(query, limit=5):
    """Search OpenAlex for papers."""
    resp = requests.get(
        f"{OA_API}/works",
        params={
            "search": query,
            "per_page": limit,
        },
        headers={"User-Agent": "ResearchPlugins/1.0 (https://wentor.ai)"},
    )
    return resp.json().get("results", [])

papers = search_papers("attention mechanism transformer")
for p in papers:
    authors = [a["author"]["display_name"] for a in p.get("authorships", [])[:3]]
    print(f"[{p.get('publication_year')}] {p.get('title')}")
    print(f"  {', '.join(authors)} — Citations: {p.get('cited_by_count')}")
    print(f"  DOI: {p.get('doi', 'N/A')}")

BibTeX Generation

def get_bibtex(doi):
    """Get BibTeX for a paper via CrossRef DOI resolution."""
    resp = requests.get(
        f"https://api.crossref.org/works/{doi}",
        headers={"User-Agent": "ResearchPlugins/1.0 (https://wentor.ai; mailto:[email protected])"},
    )
    msg = resp.json().get("message", {})

    # Generate citation key
    authors = msg.get("author", [])
    first_author = authors[0].get("family", "unknown").lower() if authors else "unknown"
    year = str(msg.get("published", {}).get("date-parts", [[""]])[0][0])
    key = f"{first_author}{year}"

    # Build BibTeX
    authors_str = " and ".join(f"{a.get('given', '')} {a.get('family', '')}".strip() for a in authors)
    doi_str = msg.get("DOI", "")

    title = msg.get("title", [""])[0] if isinstance(msg.get("title"), list) else msg.get("title", "")
    journal = msg.get("container-title", [""])[0] if msg.get("container-title") else ""

    bibtex = f"""@article{{{key},
  title = {{{title}}},
  author = {{{authors_str}}},
  year = {{{year}}},
  journal = {{{journal}}},
  doi = {{{doi_str}}},
}}"""
    return bibtex

# Example
bibtex = get_bibtex("10.18653/v1/N19-1423")
print(bibtex)