citecheck: An MCP Server for Automated Bibliographic Verification and Repair in Scholarly Manuscripts

2026-03-18

AI Summary

This work addresses persistent issues in academic manuscripts—such as erroneous citation identifiers, missing metadata, misattributed authorship, and confusion between preprints and published versions—exacerbated by the propensity of large language models to generate citation hallucinations. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a TypeScript-based Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that integrates automated citation validation into intelligent scholarly editing workflows for the first time. Our system employs a manifestation-aware matching mechanism and policy-gated rewriting strategies, harmonizing data from multiple sources including PubMed, Crossref, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar. It supports structured parsing of diverse file formats and multi-round retrieval to generate precise correction suggestions. The prototype has been rigorously evaluated across 47 test cases covering repair actions, exception handling, and protocol compliance, demonstrating robust defense against both conventional citation errors and LLM-induced hallucinations.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Reference lists in scholarly manuscripts frequently contain errors, including incorrect identifiers, incomplete metadata, misattributed authors, and mismatches between preprint and published versions. These problems are tedious to repair manually and have become more visible in workflows that rely on large language models, which can fabricate or corrupt citations. We present citecheck, a TypeScript system and MCP server for automated bibliographic verification and repair in paper-like project folders. Given a manuscript file or workspace, citecheck selects the most likely paper artifact, extracts references from .bib, .tex, .md, .txt, or .docx, validates entries against PubMed, Crossref, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar, and returns structured correction proposals together with replacement-safety diagnostics. The current repository provides a working research prototype with multi-pass retrieval, manifestation-aware matching, policy-gated rewrite planning, and 47 passing tests covering repair behavior, malformed payload handling, transport failures, and MCP exposure. We position citecheck as infrastructure for agentic scholarly editing and as a practical guardrail against both traditional reference errors and LLM-induced citation hallucinations.

Problem

• bibliographic errors
• citation hallucination
• reference validation
• scholarly manuscripts
• LLM-induced errors

Innovation

• automated bibliographic verification
• manifestation-aware matching
• policy-gated rewrite planning
• citation hallucination mitigation
• MCP server