Reference Checker: Are Your References Real?
Paste your reference list. For every reference, the checker looks for the published record in Crossref and OpenAlex, tells you whether it matches, lists any details that differ (year, first author, volume, pages, DOI), and flags retracted papers. Free, with no sign-up.
Paste your reference list
Any style. Up to 30 references at a time. Your list is not saved or used for training.
Writing from these sources? Upload the papers to Litrevu and ask what they say. It only cites papers in your library, and every citation opens the passage it came from.
Try it with your papersWhat the checker looks for
- Does it exist? A match needs the title to agree in both directions, plus the first author or the year. Similar-sounding titles are not enough, because invented references often borrow the words of real ones.
- Are the details right? Year, first author, volume, first page and DOI are compared with the record, and anything that differs is named.
- Does the DOI belong to this paper? A real DOI attached to the wrong paper is a common sign of an invented reference. DOIs no registration agency knows are flagged too.
- Has it been retracted? Crossref carries the Retraction Watch database, so retractions and expressions of concern show up next to the reference.
Why references go wrong
Chatbots write references that look right and are not. In one test, 55 per cent of GPT-3.5's citations and 18 per cent of GPT-4's were fabricated (Walters and Wilder, Scientific Reports, 2023). In another, GPT-4o fabricated 19.9 per cent, and 45.4 per cent of the real ones had errors (Linardon and colleagues, JMIR Mental Health, 2025). It reaches published work too: an audit of PubMed papers reported in May 2026 found papers citing a non-existent reference rose from 1 in 2,828 in 2023 to 1 in 277 in early 2026 (Retraction Watch).
Honest slips cause trouble as well. A citation in the text with no matching entry in the list, or a wrong year, can read to a marker like a fabricated source. Checking before you submit costs a minute.
How accurate is it?
The matching rules are tested against a set of references whose right answer is known: real papers written in APA, Harvard, MLA, Vancouver and IEEE; a wrong year; a wrong volume and pages; an invented paper; an invented DOI; a real DOI attached to the wrong paper; a retracted paper; a book; and a paper that both indexes date to a later re-posting. On 23 September 2026 the checker got all thirteen right. That is a small set, and it is there to catch mistakes in the rules, not to promise perfection.
What it cannot do yet: find records Crossref and OpenAlex do not hold (many books, theses, reports and some regional journals), or tell you whether a source supports the sentence you cite it for. When it cannot find something, it says so, and never calls a reference fake.
Questions
Is the reference checker free?
Yes, with no account. Each check covers up to 30 references, with a limit on how many checks one person can run in an hour.
Do you keep my reference list?
No. Each reference is sent to Crossref, OpenAlex and doi.org to be looked up, the results come back to you, and the list is not saved or used to train anything.
Why is a reference “not found” when I know it exists?
Most often it is a book, a chapter, a thesis or a report, which these indexes cover patchily. Check it in your library catalogue or Google Scholar. If it is a journal article, compare the title and year with the journal's own page.
Does it format my references in APA or Harvard?
Not yet. Download the found references as BibTeX or RIS and a reference manager such as Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote will format them in any style.