Check your bibliography without leaving Word

Open the pane and sign in

• The “Check Bibliography” button on the right of the Home ribbon opens the pane. After restarting Word the button may be gone: Home → Add-ins → Developer Add-ins → Reference Verify (two clicks), or the “Reference Verify (Word)” Start-menu shortcut.
• The add-in is for members and you sign in INSIDE the pane with email and password. Your document stays in Word; no extra window opens.
• If you registered with Google you have no password, and a Google window cannot open inside Word, so there are two routes: (a) press “Sign in via browser” in the pane — it shows a code, you approve that code in the browser where you are already signed in, and the pane opens within seconds; (b) press “Forgot my password” and set one once from the link in your email (for accounts without a password that link arrives as SET password).

The document is read, you start the check

• As soon as it opens the pane reads the document and says “N references found · heading: References”, listing the first entries so you can see it read the right section.
• There is NO automatic run: nothing is looked up until you press “Check the bibliography”. The expected duration is shown on the card, based on the number of references.
• The check only checks; you do not pick a style. The pane detects your document's style and shows it on the card: “Your document's style: APA 7 (detected)”. Changing the style is the Style tab's job.
• To check only a few entries, select them in the document and press “Check selected references”.
• If no reference heading is found the pane shows exactly what to do: one line saying “References” above the list is enough.

Reading the results: color is the verdict

• VerifiedA record matching the entry was found in the scholarly indexes; author, year and title agree.
• UnverifiedNo certain match. This does NOT mean wrong: niche journals, book chapters and sources outside the indexes land here — check them by hand.
• SuspiciousA dead or wrong DOI, or a strong conflict with the record found. Check before you submit.
• Archival sourceLetters, manuscripts and archive documents are not looked up in indexes; the pane says plainly that they were not checked.

• A strip stays at the top: All · Verified · Unverified · Suspicious counts. Click to filter; it stays visible while you scroll, so you never lose the overall picture.
• Retracted works and articles carrying an expression of concern get their own red badge; no corrected entry is produced for a retracted work.
• What stays visible on the card is what makes the decision: the verdict, the entry as it appears in your document, and the corrected form.
• Click “Details” to open the evidence: match score, the title, year and journal of the record found, and its DOI.

Fixing the document

• “Fix in document” on a card replaces that entry with its corrected form — no copy and paste. Corrected fields (authors, year, DOI, pages…) are written in your document's OWN style; a number you typed in a numbered list is kept.
• If your document's style cannot be detected with confidence, the pane does not guess: the fix buttons are disabled and it points you to the Style tab.
• “Fix the bibliography in the document (N)” applies them one by one and then reports how many were updated and how many could not be found.
• Every write is undone with Word's own undo: Ctrl+Z.
• “Show in document” finds and selects the entry in the document, so you can see where it sits before changing it.
• If you close and reopen the pane, the last check's corrections are kept for 12 hours: you can apply them to the same document without running the check again.

The Citations tab

• It compares each citing sentence with the source you cited: does the source actually support that claim, or does the sentence say something the source never said?
• If you already ran the Bibliography tab on this document the same references are reused, which is why “Also check the bibliography” starts switched off — turn it on if you want that report too.

The Style tab

• This is the only place where the style changes. The list matches the website's Reference style tool: APA 7, IEEE, Vancouver, İSNAD 2 (in-text), MLA, Chicago, Harvard and other journal styles, plus searching a journal's style by name and uploading your own .csl file.
• Pick the target style; the pane first shows WHAT WILL CHANGE: how many entries and how many in-text citation markers.
• “Apply in document” converts the bibliography and the in-text markers TOGETHER — APA's “(Vaswani et al., 2017)” becomes “[3]” in IEEE, for example. The bibliography is written in the new style's order: alphabetical for author–date styles, order of first citation for numbered styles (if an entry cannot be found in the document, the pane leaves the order to you and says so).
• Connectives and abbreviations (“and/ve”, “et al./vd.”) follow your document's language, and works by the same author in the same year become 2020a/2020b. Unverified entries are left as they are.
• Footnote styles (İSNAD notes, Chicago notes, OSCOLA) are not applied from the pane — citations have to become Word footnotes; you are pointed to the Reference style tool on the website for that.
• The whole conversion is undone with Ctrl+Z.

Report and saving

• “Add the report to the document” writes the summary at the end of your file — for your supervisor or an editor.
• With “Save this result to my account” ticked the report is kept under My activity, where you can create a share link or email it. Leave it unticked and the results stay on screen only.

If something goes wrong

• If you see a “Your installation is out of date” banner at the top, close Word completely and run the installer once more — that is the only way write permission refreshes.
• If the pane opens plain and single-colored you are in the classic view; your Word uses the old engine. Checking the bibliography and fixing entries work there too.
• When asking for support, click the version line at the very bottom of the pane: your Word version, installation stamp, engine and session state are copied to the clipboard in one block. It contains no personal data.

Windows — desktop Word

Close Word, download install.cmd and double-click it. It downloads the manifest into your user folder, registers it with Word and opens Word; the “Check Bibliography” button sits on the right of the Home ribbon. If Windows shows an “unrecognized app” warning, choose “More info → Run anyway”. The next time you start Word, pick Home → Add-ins → Developer Add-ins → Reference Verify (two clicks) or start Word from the “Reference Verify (Word)” Start menu shortcut — Microsoft makes add-ins installed outside the store re-selectable per session; the AppSource listing will remove that step. If you prefer a terminal, paste into PowerShell:

irm https://referenceverify.com/word-add-in/install.ps1 | iex

Download install.cmd · To remove: uninstall.cmd

Mac — desktop Word

Paste one line into Terminal; the manifest is copied into Word's add-in folder. Restart Word: Insert → My Add-ins → Developer Add-ins → Reference Verify.

curl -sSL https://referenceverify.com/word-add-in/install.sh | bash

Organization account (Microsoft 365 admin)

Admin center → Settings → Integrated apps → “Upload custom apps” → manifest.xml. It then appears automatically in everyone's Word (desktop and web); the recommended route for institutions with a campus license.

Word on the web

Insert → Add-ins → My Add-ins → “Upload My Add-in” → choose the manifest.xml you downloaded. An AppSource listing is in preparation; once published it will be a one-click install everywhere.

Download manifest.xml