Free citation verification

Verify academic citations against real scholarly records.

Paste your references. CitationCheck resolves scholarly identifiers, searches academic metadata, compares bibliographic details, and shows the evidence behind every result.

Free · No account required · Evidence shown

Check citations See how it works

Built for the moment a reference looks plausible, reads well, and you still can't find it anywhere.

Citation checker

How it works

Paste references

CitationCheck extracts titles, authors, years, and scholarly identifiers such as DOIs, PMIDs, and arXiv IDs.
Find scholarly records

Identifiers are resolved with the matching scholarly service; references without identifiers are searched against Crossref and OpenAlex.
Compare the evidence

The submitted reference is compared with the record field by field, contradictions are checked, and every difference is shown.

See the full process, with worked examples

What a result looks like

Every check ends in an evidence card, not a bare verdict. This is a representative example — run the sample list in the checker above to see live results.

Example result

Evidence

DOI: Resolves to a Crossref record
Title: Matches
Authors: 2 of 2 cited authors found in the record
Year: Close — citation says 2024, record says 2025 (online-first vs print)
Journal: Matches

What this does not mean

This result does not determine source quality, relevance, retraction status, or whether the source supports the claim where it was cited.

What CitationCheck checks

Identifiers

DOI, PMID, and arXiv identifiers, resolved against the appropriate scholarly service.

Titles

Normalized title similarity — punctuation, capitalization, and accents don't count against a match.

Authors

Author identity and overlap, with particle surnames and “et al.” handled.

Publication details

Year, journal or venue, volume, issue, and pages, with tolerance for online-first timing.

Five honest answers, not one misleading score

A citation can look correct and still point to the wrong paper. Every check ends in one of five clearly defined states.

What each result means

Verified
The citation appears to correspond to a real record, and its important details substantially agree. It does not mean the source is high quality, unretracted, or that it supports your claim.
Partial match
A likely related record exists, but one or more important fields differ — a wrong year, different authors, or a DOI pointing at a different paper.
Needs review
The evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or conflicting. A human needs to look at the source.
Not found
The enabled sources returned no adequate record. Not found does not automatically mean fake — coverage, spelling, indexing delays, and non-scholarly sources all affect results.
Service unavailable
A data provider failed or timed out, so the check could not be completed. This says nothing about the citation itself.

Verification should be inspectable.

CitationCheck does not ask an AI model whether a citation “looks real.” It checks scholarly metadata — Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, and arXiv — and shows the evidence used to classify every reference. The classification rules are public, and a Verified result is deliberately difficult to earn.

Read methodology View data sources

Who it's for

Students & educators

Check a bibliography before submission — or before grading it.

Researchers & editors

Screen reference lists for malformed or unresolvable citations before review.

Librarians & reviewers

A fast, transparent first pass — with the evidence to verify the tool's work.

Citation checking works best as a routine habit, and habits don't form behind paywalls. Basic checks are free, anonymous, and stay that way.

If you'd like to hear when new capabilities land — saved check history, exports, retraction flags — leave an email. That's all it's for, and it's entirely optional.

Common questions

What does Verified mean?: The citation's identifier (if present) resolves to a real scholarly record, the title substantially agrees, no field critically contradicts the record, and the citation carried enough detail — typically title plus authors — to corroborate the match. Verified is deliberately difficult to earn: when evidence is ambiguous, you get Needs review instead.
Does Verified mean the source is credible?: No. Verified means the bibliographic information corresponds to a real record. The paper could still be weak, superseded, corrected, retracted, or irrelevant to the claim it supports. Verification checks the record; human review checks the meaning.
Why did CitationCheck return Needs review?: Usually one of three reasons: the citation conflicts with the record it points to (for example, a real DOI and title with different authors — a common pattern in corrupted or generated citations); the citation is too sparse to corroborate a match (a bare DOI or a title alone); or a data provider was unavailable, so coverage was incomplete. The card always states which.
Does Not found mean the citation is fake?: No. Not found means the enabled sources returned no adequate record. Coverage gaps, unusual spelling, indexing delays, non-scholarly sources (newspapers, webpages, reports), and incomplete details can all cause a real work to go unfound. Treat it as a prompt to check the original source.

All frequently asked questions

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Free citation checks with the evidence shown for every result. No account required.

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