Overview
A referencing check covers two things. First, correspondence: each in-text citation or note points to an entry in the reference list or bibliography, names and years agree, and there are no orphan references. Second, conformity: each entry follows the rules of your required style — author format, date position, italics, capitalization, DOI or URL presentation, and the handling of edge cases such as corporate authors, translated works, reports, datasets, legislation or AI-generated content.
Style editions matter. APA's 7th edition (2020) remains current; MLA is on its 9th edition (2021); the Chicago Manual of Style moved to its 18th edition in 2024; Harvard is not one style but a family of institutional variants, many now based on Cite Them Right (13th edition, 2025); OSCOLA published its 5th edition in March 2026; and the Bluebook reached its 22nd edition in May 2025. We confirm which edition your department, journal or court-style assignment requires before editing — older editions are still sometimes mandated.
Corrections are made in tracked changes. Where information is missing (a page number for a quotation, the volume of a journal, a DOI), we add it only when we can verify it from a reliable bibliographic source, and otherwise mark it for you. If you use Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote, we can tell you which records to fix so the errors do not return in the next document.
Who it’s for and the problems it solves
This is for you if you are…
- Students submitting essays, dissertations and theses with a required referencing style
- Doctoral candidates with hundreds of references accumulated over several years
- Authors preparing a journal submission in a specific style such as AMA, Vancouver or IEEE
- Law students and legal researchers using OSCOLA or the Bluebook
- Anyone whose reference manager output looks wrong, or who switched styles midway
Common problems we help with
- Feedback says 'referencing inconsistent' but you cannot see where
- Your reference list mixes entries exported from different databases and generators
- You need to switch the whole document from Harvard to APA, or from numbered to author-date
- You are not sure whether your department wants Chicago 17th or 18th, or an older APA edition
- Numbered citations are out of sequence after you added and removed sources
What’s included — and what isn’t
Included
- Confirmation of the required style and edition (and any departmental or journal variation)
- Two-way check: every in-text citation or note has a reference entry, and every entry is cited
- Correction of in-text citation format: author names, et al. rules, dates, page or paragraph locators, ordering of multiple citations
- Correction of reference entries: order of elements, punctuation, italics, capitalization, DOIs and URLs
- Numbering sequence check for numeric styles (IEEE, Vancouver, AMA)
- Footnote style checks for notes-based styles (Chicago notes-bibliography, OSCOLA, Bluebook), including short forms and subsequent citations
- Verification of incomplete entries against publisher or database records where possible, with anything unverifiable flagged
- Style conversion from one system to another, on request
Not included
- Finding sources for uncited claims or adding references you have not read
- Checking whether each source actually supports the claim it is cited for (offered as a citation audit)
- Paraphrasing or rewriting text to change similarity report results
- Legal advice or checking the current validity of case law and legislation
What you receive
- Corrected document
- Your file with citation and reference corrections in tracked changes, or corrections made in your reference manager library by arrangement.
- Issues log
- A list of problems we could not resolve without you — missing page numbers, uncited references, sources we could not verify — with locations.
- Style notes
- A short summary of the rules that caused the most errors in your document, with correct examples for future use.
How it works
Confirm style and edition
You tell us the required style and share any department, journal or court-style guide. We confirm the edition and any local variations.
Match citations and entries
We cross-check every citation against the reference list and flag orphans in both directions.
Correct format
We correct each citation and entry to the style, verifying missing details where reliable records exist.
Return with log
You receive the tracked-changes file and an issues log for the items only you can resolve.
Styles we check, and what to watch in each
- APA 7th edition
- Author–date; 'et al.' from the first citation for three or more authors; up to 20 authors in the reference; no publisher location; DOIs as https://doi.org/ links. Common in psychology, education, business and nursing.
- MLA 9th edition
- Author–page citations and a Works Cited list built on core elements and containers. Widely used in literature and languages.
- Chicago 18th edition and Turabian
- Notes-bibliography or author-date. CMOS 18 (2024) drops the place of publication for books and prefers repeating author names over the 3-em dash. Turabian's 10th edition, adapting CMOS 18 for students, is listed by the University of Chicago Press for late 2026; many courses still cite Turabian 9, so we confirm which applies.
- Harvard variants
- There is no single official Harvard style. Many UK institutions use Cite Them Right (13th edition, updated July 2025); others have their own guide. We follow the version your institution publishes.
- IEEE
- Numbered citations in square brackets in order of first appearance, abbreviated journal titles and initials before surnames. Standard in engineering and computer science.
- Vancouver / ICMJE and NLM
- Numbered citations with references formatted per NLM's Citing Medicine, as referenced by the ICMJE Recommendations. Used across biomedical journals.
- AMA 11th edition
- Numbered, superscript citations with NLM journal abbreviations; common in medicine and health sciences journals.
- OSCOLA 5th edition
- Footnote-based legal citation for UK law, fifth edition published March 2026 with expanded domestic coverage and a restored international-law section. Many modules may still specify the 4th edition during the transition.
- Bluebook 22nd edition
- US legal citation, 22nd edition released May 2025. Law reviews use typeface conventions that differ from court documents (Bluepages); we check which your assignment follows.
Why reference managers do not solve everything
Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote format citations from the metadata in your library. If that metadata is wrong — a title in all capitals, a missing issue number, a conference paper saved as a journal article, a corporate author split into first and last names — the output is wrong too, however good the style file. We see these errors constantly, and they repeat in every document that uses the same library.
When you use a reference manager, the most durable fix is in the library, not the document. We can list the records to correct, or correct them with you in a reference manager setup session.
- Sentence case vs. title case in article titles is stored, not styled, in most managers
- Item type (report, thesis, chapter, web page) controls which fields appear
- Institutional authors need to be entered as a single field to avoid 'Organization, W. H.'
- Manual edits to formatted citations in Word are overwritten on the next refresh
Checking a citation format is not checking the source
A perfectly formatted reference can still be wrong: the year may belong to a different edition, the DOI to a different article, or the source may not say what the sentence claims. Increasingly, examiners and editors also look for references that do not exist, a known problem with text produced by AI tools. This service checks format and correspondence, and verifies details we correct. If you want every reference verified to exist and support its claim, choose a citation audit.
What the work can look like
Illustrative example — fictional data
A master's dissertation converted from Harvard to APA 7
An illustrative education master's student (fictional) learns late that the program requires APA 7 rather than the Harvard style used throughout a 15,000-word dissertation with 96 references, some managed in Zotero and some typed by hand.
Correspondence
Seven in-text citations had no matching entry, and four entries were never cited. Two citations used a different year from the reference entry.
Conversion
All in-text citations were changed to APA 7 author–date form, including 'et al.' for three or more authors from the first citation. Reference entries lost publisher locations and gained DOI links where the article had one.
Items for the student
Five direct quotations lacked page numbers and two government reports could not be identified from the details given. These went into the issues log.
Fictional example for illustration only; your document's issues will differ.
What you’ll need to provide
- The document with citations and reference list or bibliography
- The required style and edition, and any departmental style guide or journal instructions
- Access to your reference manager library or an exported file (optional, for library-level corrections)
- Copies or links for sources that are hard to identify, such as grey literature or archival material
You don’t need everything ready to ask for a quote — tell us what you have and we’ll say what’s missing.
What affects price and turnaround
Price depends on
- Number of citations and references
- Style complexity (legal footnote styles and notes-bibliography take longer than author-date)
- How far the current references are from the required style
- Whether style conversion or reference manager library corrections are included
- Turnaround
Turnaround depends on
- Number of references and footnotes
- Proportion of entries needing verification from external records
- Whether you are available to answer queries about unidentifiable sources
Every project is quoted individually. How we price our work.
Questions people ask before starting
Which edition of APA, Chicago or OSCOLA should I use?
Use the edition your department, course handbook or journal specifies — not necessarily the newest. If the guidance just says 'Chicago' or 'OSCOLA', ask whether the latest edition is accepted. We will apply whichever edition you confirm.
Can you add missing references for me?
We can complete missing details (such as volume, pages or DOI) for sources you cited, where reliable records confirm them. We do not add new sources for claims you have not referenced, because choosing sources is part of your own scholarship.
My university has its own Harvard guide. Can you follow it?
Yes. Send us the guide; institutional Harvard variants differ in punctuation, date placement and how online sources are cited, and your guide takes priority.
How do I cite generative AI tools?
APA, MLA and Chicago have each published guidance on citing AI-generated content, and your institution may have its own rules on disclosure. We format such citations according to your style; whether AI use was permitted is a question for your course rules.
Can you fix my citations in LaTeX?
Yes. We check your .bib file and the output of BibTeX or biblatex styles, correcting entries at the source.
Will you change my text?
Only the citations, notes and reference entries. If a citation seems to be missing from a sentence, we add a comment, not a source.