Scholar Sidekick — Citation Verifier for VS Code

Catch fabricated, retracted, and out-of-date references in your .bib file — before you submit. Scholar Sidekick verifies every entry in your BibTeX bibliography against the real scholarly record and flags problems inline, the same way a linter flags bad code.

Built for people who write citation-bearing documents in VS Code (and forks like Cursor, Windsurf, and Positron): LaTeX authors using LaTeX Workshop and Quarto / R Markdown authors.

This is not a citation inserter — Quarto and Zotero already do that well. It's the safety net that checks the references you already have.

What it does

For each entry in a .bib file it calls the Scholar Sidekick API and surfaces:

Signal	How it shows up
🔴 Possible fabrication — the title doesn't match the work at the DOI/PMID/… (the Topaz et al. 2026 pattern: a real identifier with an invented title)	Error squiggle + Problems panel
🟠 Retracted / expression of concern (Crossref + Retraction Watch)	Warning squiggle
🔵 Unresolved / ambiguous identifier	Info squiggle
📂 Open access status + best legal URL (Unpaywall)	Hover card
✅ Verified	Hover card + status-bar tally

Hover any entry for the full verdict. The status bar shows a running tally: 📖 ✓ 36 ✗ 1 fabricated? ⚠ 2 retracted ⊘ 4 unverifiable.

Honest coverage: entries with no resolvable identifier (DOI/PMID/ISBN/arXiv/…) are reported as unverifiable, never silently counted as clean.

Usage

Save a .bib file → it verifies automatically (toggle with scholarSidekick.verifyOnSave).
Or run Scholar Sidekick: Verify Bibliography from the Command Palette.
Verify Bibliography (workspace) sweeps every .bib in the project.

No account or API key is required — the free anonymous tier is used by default. For higher rate limits, set scholarSidekick.apiKey to an ssk_… key from your account.

Settings

Setting	Default	Purpose
`scholarSidekick.apiBase`	`https://scholar-sidekick.com`	API base URL
`scholarSidekick.apiKey`	`""`	Optional `ssk_` bearer token
`scholarSidekick.verifyOnSave`	`true`	Verify on save
`scholarSidekick.checkRetraction`	`true`	Flag retractions
`scholarSidekick.checkOpenAccess`	`false`	Surface OA status
`scholarSidekick.maxConcurrency`	`4`	Parallel requests

Development

npm install
npm run compile      # or: npm run watch
# Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host

A sample bibliography for manual testing lives at fixtures/sample.bib.

License

MIT