Overview
Reference lists drift during long projects. Sources are cut from the text but stay in the list; a citation reads Smith (2019) while the list says 2020; a co-author is missing; a reference manager duplicated an entry with a slightly different title. None of these are serious alone, but together they signal carelessness to a reader who checks, and some examiners do.
Two newer risks make auditing more important. First, generative AI tools can produce convincing references that do not exist, with plausible authors, journals and even DOIs that resolve to unrelated papers. Second, papers are retracted after publication, sometimes years later, and citing a retracted study as sound evidence without acknowledging the retraction is a real problem in health and life sciences in particular. Since Crossref made the Retraction Watch database openly available in 2023, these checks can be done systematically.
We work through your document and reference list line by line, verify each entry against Crossref, DataCite, publisher pages or library catalogs, and record what we find. You receive a log of issues with the evidence for each, so you or your editor can make corrections confidently. If you want the fixes applied too, that is available through our citation formatting service.
Who it’s for and the problems it solves
This is for you if you are…
- Doctoral and master's candidates about to submit a thesis with a long reference list
- Authors preparing a manuscript or responding to a reviewer who questioned specific references
- Researchers who used AI tools during literature searching and want every reference independently verified
- Supervisors, editors and research offices checking a document before it goes out under their name
- Systematic reviewers who need to confirm that no included study has been retracted
Common problems we help with
- You are not sure every in-text citation has a matching reference, or vice versa
- Some references came from notes, older drafts or an AI chat and you cannot remember checking them
- DOIs in your list give errors or lead to the wrong article
- A reviewer asked whether you are aware that a cited paper was retracted
- Your reference manager library contains duplicates and inconsistent metadata
What’s included — and what isn’t
Included
- Two-way cross-check: every in-text citation matched to a reference entry and every reference entry cited at least once (orphans and missing entries flagged)
- Consistency checks between citation and entry: author surnames, year, suffixes (2021a/2021b), et al. usage and page numbers for quotations
- Verification of each reference against the published record: authors, title, journal or publisher, volume, issue, pages, year
- DOI validation: each DOI resolved through doi.org and confirmed to point to the cited work; missing DOIs identified where one exists
- Retraction, correction and expression-of-concern screening using the openly available Retraction Watch data via Crossref and publisher notices
- Detection of fabricated or 'hallucinated' references, including real-looking DOIs attached to the wrong paper
- Flags for predatory or questionable venues where relevant, and for over-reliance on secondary citations
- Style-conformance notes for your required style (APA 7, Harvard variants, Chicago, Vancouver, IEEE and others)
Not included
- Finding replacement sources to support claims on your behalf — we flag unsupported or unverifiable citations and you decide how to address them
- Checking whether each source actually supports the specific claim it is cited for (available as a separate, deeper review through fact and data verification)
- Correcting references in your document unless you add the formatting service
- Legal advice on copyright of quoted material
What you receive
- Reference audit log
- A spreadsheet listing every reference with status (verified, corrected detail, DOI issue, not found, retracted or corrected), the evidence we found and a suggested correction.
- Citation cross-check report
- Orphan references, citations missing from the list, and citation–entry mismatches, with page or line locations in your document.
- Retraction and integrity flags
- A short summary of any retracted, corrected or concerned papers, with links to the notices and options for handling them in your text.
- Unverifiable references list
- Entries we could not locate in any database or catalog after a structured search, with the searches tried, so you can confirm or remove them.
How it works
Brief and files
You send the document, the reference list (and ideally your reference manager export) and the required citation style.
Extraction and cross-check
We extract in-text citations and entries, pair them and flag orphans, missing entries and mismatches.
Verification against the record
Each entry is checked against Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, publisher sites or library catalogs; DOIs are resolved and retraction status is screened.
Log and walkthrough
You receive the audit log and summary, and we go through any serious issues with you, such as retractions or unverifiable sources.
Checks, databases and tools
- Crossref metadata search
- Matches journal articles, books and conference papers to registered metadata so we can correct authors, titles, volumes and pages and find missing DOIs.
- DOI resolution
- Every DOI is resolved through the central doi.org resolver and the landing page checked. A DOI that resolves to a different paper is a common sign of an AI-generated reference.
- Retraction Watch data (via Crossref)
- The Retraction Watch database, acquired and opened by Crossref in 2023, lists retractions and related notices; we check your references against it and against publisher notices.
- DataCite, PubMed and catalogs
- For datasets, software, preprints, biomedical literature, books and theses that are not registered with Crossref.
- Reference manager diagnostics
- Duplicate detection and metadata clean-up in Zotero, Mendeley Reference Manager or EndNote, which also flag retracted items in some cases.
- Style manuals
- APA Publication Manual (7th edition), Chicago Manual of Style, IEEE and Vancouver/ICMJE conventions, and your institution's Harvard variant.
Orphans, mismatches and drift
An orphan reference appears in the list but is never cited; a missing entry is the reverse. Mismatches are subtler: a citation to Nguyen et al. (2021) where the list has Nguyen and Park (2021), or two 2020 papers by the same author without a/b suffixes. We report each with its location so fixes are quick.
We also note patterns rather than just instances. If most errors trace back to one reference manager group or a chapter written early, we tell you, because fixing the source prevents new errors appearing in the next draft.
References that do not exist
Large language models are known to generate citations that look real but are not: familiar author names, plausible titles, real journals, and page ranges that fit. Some carry a genuine DOI belonging to a different article. Such references can slip into drafts through AI-assisted literature searches or note-taking.
We treat any entry we cannot find after searching Crossref, Google Scholar, library catalogs and the named journal's archive as unverified, and we list exactly where we looked. Occasionally a genuine but obscure source turns up once you share the PDF; otherwise the entry should be removed and the claim it supported reconsidered.
Retracted and corrected papers
Citing a retracted paper is not automatically wrong — you may be discussing the retraction itself — but relying on its findings as evidence is. We flag retractions, corrections and expressions of concern, link to the notices and suggest options: remove the citation, replace it with sound evidence you identify, or cite it explicitly as retracted.
For systematic reviews, retraction screening of included studies is increasingly expected, and we can run it at the protocol, screening or pre-submission stage.
- Retraction: the paper's findings should not be relied on
- Correction or erratum: cite the corrected version and check whether the change affects your point
- Expression of concern: the publisher is investigating; cite with caution and note the concern
What the work can look like
Illustrative example — fictional data
Sample excerpt: reference audit log
A doctoral thesis in public health with 214 references was audited before submission. The entries below are invented to illustrate the log format.
Summary
214 entries checked. 11 orphan references and 4 citations with no entry; 23 entries with incorrect details (mostly year or page range); 6 DOIs missing and 2 broken; 1 retracted article; 2 entries not found in any source.
Entry 87 (retracted)
Cited in Chapter 2 as evidence for an intervention effect. A retraction notice was issued after publication citing data irregularities. Options: remove, replace with other evidence, or discuss as retracted.
Entries 142 and 169 (not found)
No match in Crossref, PubMed, Google Scholar or the named journal's archive for the stated volume. Entry 142's DOI resolves to an unrelated engineering paper. Please share your PDFs if you have them; otherwise treat as unverifiable.
Illustrative example with invented entries and counts. It does not describe a real thesis or client.
What you’ll need to provide
- The document in an editable format (Word, LaTeX source or Google Docs)
- The reference list, plus a reference manager export (RIS, BibTeX or library file) if you have one
- The required citation style and any departmental or journal variations
- Notes on sources you already know are unusual, such as grey literature, archival material or non-English works
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 references and in-text citations
- Proportion of sources without DOIs (books, grey literature, non-English or archival sources take longer to verify)
- Whether retraction screening is needed for every entry or a subset
- Whether you want corrections applied as well as logged
- Deadline
Turnaround depends on
- Length of the reference list and share of hard-to-verify sources
- Whether you can supply a reference manager export
- Speed of your responses to queries about unverifiable entries
Every project is quoted individually. How we price our work.
Questions people ask before starting
Can't my reference manager do this?
Reference managers help with formatting and some duplicate or retraction flags, but they only know what is in your library. They cannot tell you that a citation in the text has no entry, that an entry was typed manually with the wrong year, or that a reference never existed.
Do you check whether sources support what I say?
Not in the standard audit, which verifies that references exist and are cited correctly. Checking claims against sources is a deeper review offered through our fact and data verification service, often for a sample of key claims.
What if some of my references came from ChatGPT?
That is exactly when an audit is worthwhile. We verify each one against the published record and list any we cannot find. You then decide whether to locate the real source or remove the claim.
Which citation styles do you work with?
All major styles, including APA 7, Harvard variants, Chicago author-date and notes-bibliography, MLA, Vancouver, IEEE and journal-specific house styles. Send us your institution's guide if it has local rules.
Can you audit a LaTeX document with BibTeX?
Yes. We work from the .tex and .bib files, which also lets us catch unused BibTeX keys and entries with missing fields.