This article comes with a free Claude skill
The rule this story ends with is packaged as citations – one small file you drop into Claude Code so your own assistant works this way too. It is public domain: copy it, change it, no attribution and no permission needed. How to install it is at the end of this article.
The citation was perfect. Author names that sounded like researchers in the field. A real journal, one I recognised. A plausible year, a plausible volume, a title that described exactly the finding it was attached to.
There was no such paper.
Not a mistyped identifier, not a preprint that never made it to publication, not a paper I was struggling to find. The reference described a study that had never been performed by people who had never written it, and it looked more credible than most of the real ones on the page, because real citations have awkward titles and inconvenient author lists and this one had been generated to fit.
Why this one is different
Most of the lessons from building this site are about software, and they matter to whoever maintains it. This one is about you.
Almost everything factual on this site is about animals that people keep. Whether a food is safe. Whether a symptom is urgent. What a medication does at what dose. People act on that. Someone reads a page here and decides not to go to a vet tonight, or decides to go right now, and the thing standing between them and a bad decision is whether the claim they read is true.
An invented citation is worse than no citation, and it took me a moment to see why. A claim with no reference invites scepticism – you can feel its weight and go and check. A claim with a beautifully formatted false reference closes the question. It converts “I should verify this” into “someone already did.” It spends trust that was never earned.
What does not work
Asking the model to be careful. Instructions to only cite real sources produce more confident citations, not more real ones. The failure is not carelessness – the model is generating text that looks like a citation, and a false one satisfies that objective completely.
Checking that it looks right. Format is the one thing these always get right. A well-formed identifier is not evidence, and reviewing citations by eye means reviewing them on the single dimension where fabrications are strongest.
Spot-checking. Verifying a sample tells you about your sample. If the rest are correct, you learned nothing; if they are not, you shipped them. There is no number of correct citations that makes the next one correct.
What does work
Every identifier is checked against the source database that owns it – the actual bibliographic record, fetched, with the returned title and authors compared to what the citation claims. Not “does this identifier resolve” but “does it resolve to this“, because an identifier that points at a real but different paper is the failure mode a resolve check misses entirely.
Then the check runs at the door. A page cannot be published with an unresolved reference in it. Not a warning, not a report – the publish step refuses, names the citation, and stops.
That last part is what makes it a system rather than a habit. Verifying citations is exactly the task that gets skipped when you are nearly finished and it is late and the page is otherwise ready, which is precisely when the temptation is highest and the attention lowest. So the decision is taken out of the moment when it is hardest to make well.
The number that made me build it
Across the batches I have checked, a meaningful fraction of AI-generated citations were wrong – some entirely fabricated, some real papers that did not say the thing they were cited for. That second category is the sneaky one: the paper exists, the identifier resolves, everything passes a casual check, and the claim it is supporting is still not in it.
I am deliberately not putting a headline percentage here, because my sample is my own work in one domain and quoting a number would give it more authority than it has earned – which would be an odd way to end an article about unearned authority.
The actionable version is simpler: the rate is not low enough to skip checking, and you cannot tell which ones are wrong by looking.
What this means for reading this site
Every scientific and medical claim carries a numbered reference. Every one of those has been checked against the source database before the page went live, and a page that fails that check does not publish.
That is not a promise that everything here is right. Papers get superseded, and I get things wrong. It is a narrower promise, and the narrowness is the point: when a claim here cites a source, that source exists and says what the claim says it says.
You should still argue with the conclusions. Please do. But you should not have to wonder whether the evidence is real.
Get the skill
Everything above is generic. None of it is about rats, and none of it is specific to this site. So the rule is also published on its own as a Claude skill: a single Markdown file that an AI coding assistant reads and applies when the situation comes up.
The file: citations/SKILL.md
Or take the whole set:
git clone https://github.com/blonderoofrat/agent-skillsInstalling it in Claude Code. Copy the skill’s folder into one of these, so the file ends up at .../skills/citations/SKILL.md:
~/.claude/skills/(available in every project on your machine)your-project/.claude/skills/(that one project only)
Claude reads it at the start of the next session and applies it when what you are doing matches the description at the top of the file. You can also ask for it by name.
Using a different assistant? The file is plain Markdown with a two-line header. Paste the body into whatever system prompt, rules file or instructions file your tool uses. Nothing in the rule itself is Claude-specific.
Licence: CC0, public domain. Copy it, adapt it, ship it in commercial work, no attribution required. These are deliberately frozen snapshots rather than a maintained project, so if one is wrong for your situation, change it. That is easier than asking us to.
Part of Notes from building this site: articles about working practices that exist because something here went wrong first. The rule above is also published on its own, as a free public-domain instruction file for AI coding assistants — the citations skill, in blonderoofrat/agent-skills on GitHub.
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