A free, public-interest tool for checking whether citations correspond to real scholarly records.

CitationCheck.org

Check citations

Paste up to 10 references. One reference per line, or paste a bibliography.

Up to 10 references per check. The placeholder above is an example, not a real citation.

Checked against scholarly records. Submissions are not stored permanently — privacy.

Supports DOI, PMID, arXiv IDs, and standard academic reference formats.

How are results classified?

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.