Check your references before you submit

Free reference checking tool: it verifies every reference in your thesis or paper against open academic databases, catches AI-fabricated citations and unresolvable DOIs, finds the real record, and reformats it to the style you need (APA, Vancouver, IEEE and more).

How to use this tool

Paste a reference list (or upload a .txt/.docx/.pdf) and we verify each entry against scholarly databases — catching fabricated, mismatched, retracted or wrongly-formatted citations.

  1. Paste your references, or upload a file — from a full paper we auto-detect the bibliography section. .bib/.ris imports are also supported.
  2. Pick a citation style (APA 7, IEEE, Vancouver, MLA or a CSL style).
  3. Click “Check”. Each reference is checked for reality (DOI / year / authors / journal), for formatting, and against the retraction database.
  4. Read the result: a colored badge (verified / suspicious / not found) and a 0–100 confidence score per entry.
  5. Click any citation to see the matched source record and where it was found.
  6. Copy the “Repaired bibliography” (complete, in-order list — verified entries rewritten, the rest kept as-is and numbered for manual checking) or download it as Word.
  7. About to submit? Use the “Pre-submission check” card: enter the target journal and get a single Word report combining bibliography health, retractions and the journal's reliability.
Full guide & PDF →

Check your bibliography

Put each reference on its own line, or upload a PDF · Word · .odt · .rtf · text file — you can also drag and drop it onto the box below. Guest: 5 searches/day · Member: first day unlimited, then 20 references/day · Pro: unlimited.

Example scenarios — no bibliography at hand? Pick one; the tool fills the box with a sample reference and checks it right away.

The selected style determines the corrected bibliography below and the copied/downloaded output.

Your text is processed in your browser, is never stored and is never sent to Turnitin or any other plagiarism database.

What do the colours mean?

Every reference is searched in the academic indexes and marked with one of three outcomes:

#1Verified

Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.

Green: a record was found and the title/authors/year match. The reference is real and was auto-formatted to your chosen style.
#2Unverified — please check

Devlin, J., et al. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. NAACL.

Yellow/orange: the source WAS searched but there is no certain match — here the title matches while the year differs (record says 2019). Not necessarily wrong; check by hand before submission.
#3Suspicious / fabricated

Ozdemir, C. (2023). A novel approach to early cancer diagnosis with deep learning. Journal of AI in Medicine, 12(3), 45-60. https://doi.org/10.1234/jaim.2023.045

Red: no match in CrossRef, OpenAlex, PubMed or any other index; the DOI does not resolve in any database — most likely fabricated.

Members get free weekly email alerts: new citations to your work (ORCID), new papers on a topic, new publications by an author you follow, and retractions of sources in your saved reports. Set up alerts →