CiteTrue Citation Checker is a free, AI-powered tool that verifies every reference in a paper against authoritative academic databases. Paste a reference list in APA, MLA or another style and it reports which citations are genuine and which look fake or AI-generated.

It is built for anyone who needs to confirm that a source exists and that its details are correct: students, PhD candidates, professors reviewing drafts, and journal editors screening submissions.

Key Features

Batch checking: paste a whole reference list and verify dozens or hundreds of entries in one run, not one at a time.
Field-by-field verification: title, authors, year, DOI, venue, volume and pages are each compared with the matched record.
Confidence scores: every citation gets a score showing how likely it is to be authentic, so weak entries stand out.
Multi-database search: references are cross-referenced against sources such as Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex, IEEE, Springer and Wiley.
Fabrication detection: invented DOIs, references to papers that were never published, and AI-hallucinated citations are flagged.

Who Should Use CiteTrue Citation Checker

Students and early-career researchers who want to avoid retraction risk before submitting a paper.
Professors and advisors reviewing student drafts who need to spot fabricated references quickly.
Journal editors and peer reviewers screening submissions, where bogus references are hardest to catch by hand.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CiteTrue Citation Checker?

A free citation verification tool that searches academic databases to confirm that each reference points to a real, correctly described publication, and flags citations that look fake or AI-generated.

Which citation styles are supported?

You can paste references in APA, MLA and other common formats. The checker standardizes the input before verification, so mixed or messy lists still work.

How does the checker find errors?

Each reference is split into fields and compared with indexed records, because a citation can point at a real paper and still have the wrong authors, year or DOI.

Does it detect AI-generated references?

Yes. A 2023 study found that 55% of GPT-3.5 citations and 18% of GPT-4 citations were fabricated outright, and ChatGPT-written medical papers averaged 4.3 incorrect components per reference.

Ken O.

Projects by Ken O.

CiteTrue Citation Checker