Fake Citation Checker
Paste a reference list that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or any other AI tool wrote for you, and every reference is checked against the scholarly record. A DOI, PMID, ISBN or arXiv ID is resolved first; a reference without one, or with one that leads nowhere, is searched by title in Crossref and OpenAlex. Each reference comes back as found, mismatched or not found, with the record it was compared against. Free, no sign-up.
How to Use the Fake Citation Checker
- 1. Paste the references. One per line, or separate wrapped references with a blank line. Any style works: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver. Switch to Full manuscript to paste a whole essay or upload a .docx file, and the checker finds the reference list itself.
- 2. Press Check references. Identifiers go to CitationEasy's lookup, which accepts identifiers only. For each reference that still needs a search, your browser sends its title and year straight to Crossref, and to OpenAlex when Crossref has no clear match. The first 20 references are checked in one pass.
- 3. Read each verdict. Every reference shows what was written, the record it was compared against, where that record came from and a link to open it.
- 4. Confirm before you delete. Open the record for anything marked Details don't match, and search a library catalogue or Google Scholar for anything marked No record found. Then fix the reference, replace it with a source you have read, or remove the claim it was meant to support.
What Each Verdict Means
| Verdict | What the checker found | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Found | The identifier resolved to a work with the same title and year, or a title search found a record whose title, authors and year agree with the reference. | Read the source and check that it says what you cite it for. |
| Details don't match | A real work is involved, but something disagrees: the DOI belongs to a different paper, the DOI is dead while the title exists elsewhere, or the title is close but the year or authors differ. | Open the record and correct the reference from it, or replace the source. |
| No record found | The identifier does not resolve, or there is none, and no work with this title is in Crossref or OpenAlex. | Search for it by hand. If you cannot find it, treat it as invented. |
| Not checked | Crossref and OpenAlex could not be reached, or were limiting requests. | Wait a minute and check again. |
Titles are compared word by word after case, punctuation and accents are set aside, and a dropped subtitle still counts as a match. A short title such as Sleep and memory fits hundreds of works, so it is only called found when one of the record's first authors is also named in your reference.
Why AI Tools Invent References
A chatbot writes a reference the way it writes any sentence: by predicting what plausible text comes next. It does not look the work up, so it can produce a reference with real-sounding authors, a fitting journal and a well-formed DOI for a paper that was never published. When Walters and Wilder asked ChatGPT to write short literature reviews on 42 topics and checked all 636 references, 55% of the GPT-3.5 references and 18% of the GPT-4 references were fabricated, and many of the real ones carried substantive errors (Scientific Reports, 2023).
Invented references tend to fail in a few recognisable ways, and the checker looks for each:
- A DOI that leads nowhere. The DOI is well formed but no registration agency holds it.
- A DOI borrowed from another paper. It resolves, but to a work with a different title — often in an unrelated field.
- A blended title. Words from several real papers stitched into one title that no record carries.
- A real title with the wrong details. The paper exists, but the year, journal or authors have drifted.
A Reference List, Checked
Try a sample loads four references in the form chatbots produce. The second and fourth are invented for this demonstration; the other two are real.
Results for the sample list
Found
Joly, Stapel & Lindenberg (2008), Silence and table manners — written without a DOI, found by title in Crossref at 10.1177/0146167208318401.
No record found
Hartman & Okafor (2019), Neural correlates of bilingual lexical retrieval in adolescent sleep deprivation — the DOI is not registered, and no work with a close title is in Crossref or OpenAlex.
Found
Wakefield et al. (1998) in The Lancet — the DOI resolves to the same paper. It was retracted in 2010, which is why found is not the same as sound.
Details don't match
Smith (2021), Sleep and memory — the DOI resolves to a 2013 Nature paper on nanometre-scale thermometry.
What “No record found” can and cannot tell you
Crossref and OpenAlex hold most journal articles, conference papers and many books, but not everything: web pages, reports, theses, older books and regional journals are often missing from both. A reference that is not found is one to check by hand, not proof that it was invented. In the other direction, a reference that is found can still be cited for something the source never says — the checker confirms that a work exists, not what it contains.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How can I tell if a citation from ChatGPT is real?
- Look it up in a scholarly index rather than trusting the DOI or the link it gives. Paste the reference into the checker above: it resolves any identifier and searches Crossref and OpenAlex by title. Then open the record it finds and check that the authors, year and journal match before you cite it.
- Why does ChatGPT make up references?
- A language model generates text that looks like a reference without retrieving a real record, so it can combine real author names, a plausible journal and an invented title. Tools that search the web reduce the problem but do not remove it, because they can still misquote the details of what they found.
- Does the checker use AI?
- No. It resolves identifiers through public registries and compares titles, authors and years with fixed rules, and every verdict shows the record it was based on. It never generates or repairs bibliographic data.
- What is sent when I check my references?
- Only the identifiers go to CitationEasy's lookup. For references that need a title search, your browser sends the title and year — or the reference line itself when no title can be picked out — directly to Crossref and OpenAlex. Manuscript text and the rest of each reference stay in your browser, and nothing is stored.
- Can the checker miss a fake reference?
- Yes, in one way: when a chatbot attaches a real paper's title and authors to a claim the paper never made. The reference is real, so it is found. Only reading the source tells you whether it supports what you wrote.
- Why was a book or web page marked No record found?
- Crossref and OpenAlex are strongest on journal articles. Many books are better checked by ISBN, which the checker resolves through Open Library, and web pages by opening the address. Add the ISBN or DOI to a reference when you have it, and the checker uses it first.