Reference Verifier: Check DOIs and Catch Fake Citations
Paste your bibliography. Every DOI is checked against CrossRef, the DOI registry, and compared with your entry, so a real DOI attached to the wrong paper is caught too. References without a DOI are looked up by their details.
Why check your references before you submit?
Fake and broken references are now common
Reference errors used to mean a wrong page number. Since AI writing tools arrived, they increasingly mean references that do not exist at all: a plausible author, title and journal with a made-up DOI. Editors and reviewers now check, and a single invented citation can lead to a rejection or a retraction.
Mistyped DOIs cause problems too. A broken link stops readers and indexing services connecting your paper to the work you cite.
How the Reference Verifier works
Paste up to 50 references: one per line, numbered, or straight from a PDF (entries split over two lines are joined). For each reference with a DOI, the tool looks the DOI up in CrossRef, the registry that issues DOIs for most scholarly journals, and compares the record’s title and authors with your entry. References without a DOI are searched for by their details.
Verified: the DOI is registered and matches your entry. Wrong paper: the DOI is real but belongs to a different article, the most common sign of an invented reference. Check details: the title or authors only partly match. DOI not registered: check it is typed correctly and that the reference is real. Retracted: CrossRef records a retraction. Found: add DOI: no DOI in your entry, but the article is on CrossRef. Not found or Book: nothing to compare against, so check by hand.
What it cannot check
Books, reports and older articles often have no DOI and are not listed in CrossRef, and some DOIs are registered with other agencies (DataCite for datasets, for example). So “not found” is a prompt to check by hand, not proof of a fake. The comparison looks at the title and the first authors; it doesn’t check volume or page numbers.
To fix formatting once your references are verified, paste a DOI into the Citation Builder to get a correct reference in your journal’s style.
Frequently asked questions
How can I tell if a reference was made up by AI?
Look up its DOI. An invented reference usually has a DOI that is not registered, or a real DOI that belongs to a different paper. The Reference Verifier checks every DOI against CrossRef and flags both, and searches CrossRef for references with no DOI.
Does the tool detect retracted papers?
It flags articles where CrossRef records a linked retraction notice. Not every publisher registers retractions with CrossRef, so for high-stakes citations also check the Retraction Watch database or the publisher’s page.
Why does a real reference show as not found?
The DOI may have a typo, or it may be registered with another agency such as DataCite. Check the DOI on doi.org. Books and older papers often have no DOI at all.
Is my reference list stored?
No. References are sent to CrossRef only to look them up. We keep a cache of the public CrossRef records so repeat checks are faster, but not your list.
How many references can I check?
Up to 50 at a time. For a longer list, check it in batches.