Clean Your Reference List Before a Reviewer Does

What it is for

A pre-submission screen of your own bibliography for retracted work, references with serious contrasting evidence, and citations inherited from someone else's reference list without ever being read. Every flagged item gets keep, replace, or cut, in writing. It prevents a reviewer finding a retraction in your references before you do.

The skill Copy

Run your reference list through a check at first draft, not the
week of submission. You are looking for three things.

  1. Retracted or withdrawn work. A retracted citation in a
     submitted manuscript is the error that follows you around.
     Retractions land after you saved the PDF — the copy in your
     folder will never tell you.
  2. References carrying substantial contrasting evidence. You may
     still cite them. But you have to know, and the sentence around
     the citation has to be honest about it.
  3. References you inherited. Anything copied out of another
     paper's bibliography without opening it yourself. Mark these
     and open them now.

For every flagged reference, choose one of three and write it down:

  KEEP    — and add the hedge the evidence actually requires
  REPLACE — find the study that supports the sentence you wrote
  CUT     — the sentence needed no citation, or was simply wrong

Then re-read the sentences, not the list. A reference can be sound
and still be cited for a claim it never made. Check that every
citation sits beside a sentence its author would recognise.

Do this early. Finding a retracted reference three days before a
deadline pushes you to keep the sentence and patch the citation,
which is exactly how a second bad citation gets in.

When you cite a retracted or heavily contrasted work deliberately —
because the argument is about that work — say so in the text. Being
explicit is the difference between scholarship and an accident.

The failure this prevents: an editor, a reviewer, or a reader with
a browser extension seeing a retraction notice on your reference
list before you do.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

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Where it came from