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reference_check

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Checks references in a PDF against DBLP and ArXiv. The PDF parser expects references to be formatted in the ACM author-year style.

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// repository documentation

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# PDF Reference validity checker
This is a simple command-line tool to check references in a given PDF. The tool was scripted with VSCode and Gemini 3 Pro and proofread and tested by me.

## What does it do?
- Loads an input PDF (locally) **or reads references directly from a `.bib` file** (recommended when available — more reliable than PDF parsing)
- For PDF input: parses the reference section, expecting the format `Author List. YEAR. Title of the paper. Potential other information...`
    - This may sometimes lead to false negatives due to PDF extraction artefacts.
- Searches DBLP using the query: `[title] [author last names]`. All author names are used in the query, so that papers with incorrect authors will _not_ be matched.
- Checks the top five results to see if:
    - The paper title matches the record in DBLP.
    - The author list has at least one overlapping last name.
- If no match is found, the reference is reported `not found` and a list is printed in the console of all the papers that were not found.
- In case of batch mode, the results are also logged in a `reference_check/filename.log` file for later inspection.

## What should I do with this?
The script is expected to give false negatives. A **negative** is considered a reference that is **not found** in DBLP. That means **you have to check the flagged references yourself**.

It is unlikely to give **false positives**. If the script returns a list of `OK` results, you can likely trust the references in the paper.

## Installation
Install dependencies
```
pip install pypdf requests bibtexparser
```

## Running the tool
You can run the tool on a single file with:
```bash 
python reference_check.py /path/to/pdf/file.pdf
```
There are other input modes for loading files from a url or in batch mode:

### URL
```bash
# Downloads the PDF, processes it and deletes it afterward
python reference_check.py https://path_to_pdf.org/file.pdf
```

### BibTeX / BBL file
If you already have a `.bib` or `.bbl` file (e.g. exported from your reference manager, generated by LaTeX, or provided as a paper's supplemental), you can skip PDF parsing entirely and check references directly:
```bash
python reference_check.py --bib references.bib
python reference_check.py --bib references.bbl
```
This is more reliable than PDF parsing because the title, authors, and year are read directly from structured fields rather than extracted from PDF text. Use this whenever you have a `.bib` or `.bbl` available — it avoids most of the false negatives caused by PDF extraction artefacts.

Both natbib/plain and biblatex/biber `.bbl` formats are supported.

### Batch processing
```bash
# Input a path to a folder and process each PDF file in the folder.
python reference_check.py /path/to/folder
# Input the path to a txt file with PDF urls. The txt file should have a single url per line.
python reference_check.py url_list.txt
```

### Output
The results are printed in the console and logged in a `reference_check/filename.log` file for batch mode for later inspection.

Example output on one of my own papers (https://rubenwiersma.nl/assets/pdf/DeltaConv.pdf), showing only a few records. No LLMs were used in the writing of the paper (it was published before ChatGPT was released). Therefore, **you cannot conclude LLM-usage when mismatches show up**. You have to check the flags manually.
```
Checking Submission SingleCheck: Manual Run
URL: https://rubenwiersma.nl/assets/pdf/DeltaConv.pdf
============================================================
Downloading PDF from https://rubenwiersma.nl/assets/pdf/DeltaConv.pdf...
Parsing PDF content...
Extracted 86 references.
Verifying references against DBLP...
ID    Status     Details
------------------------------------------------------------
[ref_1] OK         Detected: Point convolutional neural net... (Query: DBLP: Point convolutional neural networks by extension operators Atzmon Maron Lipman Matan Haggai Yaron)
[ref_2] not found  Queries tried: DBLP: 3DmFV: ThreeDimensional Point Cloud Classification in Real-Time Using Convolutional Neural Networks Ben-Shabat Lindenbaum Fischer

[...]

Found 8 references that could not be matched to DBLP:

[ref_2] Yizhak Ben-Shabat, Michael Lindenbaum, Anath Fischer. 2018. 3DmFV: ThreeDimensional Point Cloud Classification in Real-Time Using Convolutional Neural Networks.
Queries tried: DBLP: 3DmFV: ThreeDimensional Point Cloud Classification in Real-Time Using Convolutional Neural Networks Ben-Shabat Lindenbaum Fischer

[...]
```

## Known issues
Most issues are due to incorrect PDF parsing. Use `--bib` to bypass PDF parsing entirely if you have a `.bib` file available. Feel free to open a pull request if you find a good fix for the PDF parser.
- [DBLP allows scraping](https://dblp.org/faq/1474706.html), but does have a rate limit. This means the script sometimes pauses when it gets a `429` response. This is expected.
- A paper that uses the numbered citation system (`[1] Author names`) can lead to incorrect parsing.
- The script removes dashes from the title to account for line-breaks. This may remove dashes that should be present, leading to false negatives.
- Special characters in author names may not be matched in DBLP.
- Quotes are not parsed correctly for DBLP.

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