This is meant to be a comment for @EuanG, but given the space limits in the "comment section", I write it here.

I tried to wrap up what you wrote in a "def", but it is not really working... I guess something is missing... but I am not able to figure out what..

import re

def remove_references(text):

    # Define regex patterns
    numeric_pattern = r"\[\d+\]|\(\d+\)" 
    author_year_pattern = r"\b[A-Z][a-z]+ et al\., \d{4}|\(\w+, \d{4}\)" 
    doi_url_pattern = r"\bdoi:|http[s]?://\S+"  
    sequential_numeric_pattern = r"\[\d+(,\s*\d+)*\]|\(\d+(,\s*\d+)*\)"  
    journal_style_pattern = r"[A-Za-z\s]+, \d{1,4}\([\d\-]+\):\d+\-\d+"  
    common_references_pattern = r"^\[\d+\]|\(\d+\)|\b[A-Z][a-z]+ et al\., \d{4}|\(\w+, \d{4}\)|doi:|http[s]?://"
    # Remove the references from the text using regex
    cleaned_text = re.sub(common_references_pattern, "", text)
    
    return cleaned_text