citum/skills

AI skills for Citum style authors. Install via the skills CLI:

npx skills add citum/skills

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Cline, and other skills-compatible agents.

Skills

Skill	Description
style-authoring	Author, extend, and validate Citum YAML citation styles with schema-first workflow and CLI validation

style-authoring

Helps you draft, extend, or validate a Citum YAML style — from a quick extends: override to a fully custom bibliography template — with real schema and CLI validation at each step.

Example prompts

Create a Citum style for Chemical Communications (RSC). Numeric, author initials, italic journal titles.

Extend apa-7th: remove page numbers from chapter entries, add https://doi.org/ prefix to DOIs.

Add a 'dataset' type-variant to my ACM style that inherits from 'report' but swaps
the technical report number for an archive location.

Validate my style.yaml against the Citum schema and show me any errors.

Port this CSL style to Citum YAML.

Migrate ieee.csl to Citum — use citum-migrate if available, and keep it minimal if it extends a known parent.

What it does

1. Detects context automatically — checks whether crates/citum-schema-style/src/ is present (in-repo, reads Rust types) or not (external, fetches JSON Schema from docs.citum.org). Also checks whether citum is on PATH regardless of repo context.
2. Explains Citum's structural model — prevents common hallucinations like CSL macro blocks (template:, name-list:) that don't exist in Citum. Guides you through the two-level inheritance system (extends: at style level and type-variant-level diff ops).
3. Validates with citum check --strict before rendering, then runs citum render refs to confirm output is correct.
4. Researches parent styles before writing modify/remove/add selectors — reads the actual component list so selectors are guaranteed to match.

Requirements

citum CLI: Full validation requires the citum binary. The recommended install (also installs citum-migrate for CSL porting):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/citum/citum-core/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

Or via cargo:

cargo install citum citum-migrate

The skill works without the CLI but will label output as unverified.

Modes

• In-repo (you have a local citum-core checkout): reads Rust type definitions directly as the authoritative source for field names and types.
• External (no local checkout): uses the published JSON Schema at https://docs.citum.org/schemas/style.json, which embeds doc comments from the Rust source. Fetches example styles from GitHub. Still validates with citum if it's on PATH.

Contributor skills

Skills for working on citum-core itself (style-evolve, migrate-research, rust-simplify) live in the citum-core repo under .skills/. Install them locally with:

./scripts/install-skills.sh

Links

• citum-core — the citation engine
• Citum docs — schema, examples, CLI reference