Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short answers about results, coverage, and privacy. If yours isn't here, the contact address is in the footer.
- Does “Not found” mean the citation is fake?
- No. Not found means the sources we query returned no adequate record. Coverage gaps, unusual spelling, indexing delays, non-scholarly sources (like newspapers or webpages), and incomplete details can all cause a real work to go unfound. Treat Not found as a prompt to check the original source, not as a verdict.
- Does “Verified” mean the source is good?
- No. Verified means the citation appears to correspond to a real record and its important bibliographic details substantially agree. The paper could still be weak, irrelevant, corrected, retracted, or misused in your argument. Verification checks the record. Human review checks the meaning.
- Which sources do you check against?
- Currently Crossref, OpenAlex, arXiv (for arXiv IDs), and PubMed (for PMIDs). Each has real coverage limits, described on the Data Sources page. No source covers everything, and we do not claim to search “the entire academic internet.”
- Do you store what I paste?
- Submissions are processed in memory and discarded after the response. Provider responses are cached briefly (keyed by a hash of the query) to reduce load. Full pasted text is not written to routine logs.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Basic citation checks are free and require no account.
- Is AI used to verify citations?
- No. Parsing, identifier resolution, matching, and classification are deterministic. Results come from comparing your citation with records returned by scholarly metadata providers — never from a language model’s memory.
- A result looks wrong. What should I do?
- Email us the citation and, if you have it, the DOI or a link to the correct record. Incorrect-result reports are the main way matching rules improve. The contact address is in the footer.
- Can CitationCheck tell me whether a paper supports my claim?
- No. CitationCheck compares bibliographic records. It does not read the paper, and it cannot tell you whether the paper supports a particular statement. That judgment needs a human reading the source.
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