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Does your citation actually exist?

Upload any manuscript or published PDF, paste your reference list, or enter a DOI. RefCheck verifies each citation against three independent scholarly databases in real time and flags anything that looks hallucinated or incorrect.

200M+Works indexed
50+Publishers covered
3Free APIs
0Cost to you
Works with papers from all major publishers including
Elsevier Springer Nature Wiley Taylor & Francis SAGE IEEE ACM ACS APA BMJ Oxford University Press Cambridge University Press MIT Press PLOS Frontiers MDPI BioMed Central IOP De Gruyter Wolters Kluwer arXiv PubMed Hindawi
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Drop your PDF here or click to browse

Manuscript, preprint, or published paper from any venue

RefCheck reads PDF text entirely in your browser using PDF.js. Nothing is uploaded to any server.

Numbered or unnumbered lists are both supported. Wrapped PDF lines are merged when entries begin with [1], [2], [3], and so on.

Supports DOIs, arXiv identifiers, and direct paper URLs from most publishers.

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References
How it works
Step 01

Extract

PDF text is parsed in your browser via PDF.js. The reference section is located automatically and each citation is isolated regardless of formatting style.

Step 02

Query

Each reference is searched across CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex simultaneously. All three APIs are completely free and require no account or key.

Step 03

Match

Title keywords, author names, publication year, and DOIs are compared against search results using a weighted similarity score.

Step 04

Report

Results appear as each reference resolves. Export a full CSV or JSON report suitable for editorial records or peer review documentation.

Publisher coverage
Commercial publishers
  • Elsevier
  • Springer Nature
  • Wiley Online Library
  • Taylor and Francis
  • SAGE Publishing
  • De Gruyter Brill
  • Wolters Kluwer
Open access publishers
  • MDPI
  • Frontiers Media
  • PLOS
  • BioMed Central
  • Hindawi
  • arXiv preprints
  • PubMed Central
University presses
  • Oxford University Press
  • Cambridge University Press
  • MIT Press
  • Harvard University Press
  • Princeton University Press
  • University of Chicago Press
  • Stanford and Yale Presses
Learned societies
  • IEEE
  • ACM
  • American Chemical Society
  • American Psychological Association
  • BMJ Group
  • Institute of Physics
  • American Mathematical Society
Coverage is provided through CrossRef (which aggregates metadata from virtually all scholarly publishers), Semantic Scholar (200M+ works), and OpenAlex. Any paper with a registered DOI from any publisher worldwide is within scope.