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

CitationCheck.org

Free citation verification

Check citations

Paste one citation, or a short reference list with one reference per line. You'll see what matched, what changed, and what still needs human review.

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.

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.

CitationCheck compares references with available records. It does not determine whether a source is correct, high quality, or appropriate for your argument.