reference-style-sync

What This Skill Does

The Reference Style Sync skill is a specialized tool designed to automate the synchronization and standardization of academic literature references. In a research workflow, citations often become fragmented or corrupted due to metadata errors, inconsistent formatting, or varied requirements across journals. This skill acts as a bridge between your literature management tools and a standardized output, utilizing the scripts/main.py entry point to clean, parse, and reformat reference lists according to established bibliographic guidelines. By ensuring metadata accuracy, it mitigates common manual errors like incorrect author naming, missing publication years, or improper journal abbreviations, providing a robust solution for academic writing.

Installation

To install this skill, use the OpenClaw CLI to fetch the package from the official registry. Run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/aipoch-ai/reference-style-sync

Ensure that you have Python 3.10 or higher installed, as the skill relies on modern syntax and the dataclasses library. After installation, verify the setup by running the compilation check: python -m py_compile scripts/main.py

Use Cases

This skill is best suited for complex academic projects involving large bibliographies. Primary use cases include:

• Standardizing reference lists across a long-form document such as a thesis or dissertation.
• Converting reference formats between common styles like APA, MLA, Chicago, and IEEE.
• Cleaning imported metadata from tools like Zotero or Mendeley that often contains encoding issues or missing DOI information.
• Batch-processing citations to prepare a manuscript for submission to multiple journals.

Example Prompts

1. "Sync my exported bibliography file in references/library.bib to APA 7th edition and flag any missing DOI entries."
2. "Standardize all citations in my draft to IEEE format and fix the author metadata in the input_data/references.csv file."
3. "Run a reference sync on my project folder; ensure the metadata is clean and generate a report of all entries that could not be automatically corrected."

Tips & Limitations

• Always maintain a backup of your original literature database before running synchronization scripts to prevent unintended metadata loss.
• Use the references/ folder as directed to store domain-specific guidance or custom journal style files if your project requires specialized formatting.
• The script is highly reproducible, but it is bounded by the quality of the raw metadata. If inputs are severely corrupted, the tool will mark them for manual review rather than forcing an incorrect format.