About Citeproof

Citeproof checks whether the citations in a piece of writing point to real scholarly works, and whether they're cited correctly. It's built for students, researchers and anyone editing a draft that contains references, especially text written with help from AI, which can produce references that look plausible but don't exist.

What it does

• Checks a whole reference list at once. Paste a draft or bibliography. Each reference gets a status, a confidence score and the record it matched.
• Catches common citation errors, including a DOI that points to a different paper, a wrong publication year, mismatched titles or authors, retracted works, and references that can't be found anywhere.
• Shows evidence for a claim. Given a claim and a paper, it quotes the abstract sentences most related to the claim and flags numbers in the claim that the abstract doesn't contain.
• Never invents anything. It doesn't generate citations or give true/false verdicts. It reports what the bibliographic records say.

How a check works

1. Extract. References are parsed from the text: APA, Vancouver, Chicago/MLA, numbered lists, bare DOIs, arXiv IDs and PubMed IDs. Inline citations like (Author, Year) are matched to the reference list.
2. Look up. References with a DOI or arXiv ID are looked up directly. Others are searched by title, authors and year.
3. Compare. The best candidate is scored on title, author and year agreement. Results are labelled verified, likely match, needs review, not found or unverifiable (when a source was unavailable).
4. Confirm before flagging. A DOI is reported as unregistered only after checking the global DOI registry at doi.org. "Not found" means a work isn't in these indexes. It isn't proof the work doesn't exist, because books, theses and very new or non-indexed works can be missing.

One check is one run over one submitted text, such as a draft or reference list (up to 25 references on the Free plan and 60 on Pro), or a single lookup on its own. Follow-up lookups on references from a check you ran in the last 24 hours don't use another check. See Plans for limits and reset times.

Data sources

• Crossref: DOI metadata for most journal articles, books and proceedings.
• DataCite: DOIs for arXiv preprints, datasets and repositories such as Zenodo.
• OpenAlex: an open (CC0) index of scholarly works, used for retraction status, abstracts and search.
• doi.org: the DOI registry, used to confirm whether a DOI exists at all.

Only reference metadata (titles, authors, DOIs) is sent to these services, never your full text. Evidence is based on abstracts, not full papers.Citeproof isn't affiliated with these organisations or with OpenAI.