Overview
CiteTrue is a free citation checker that takes a pasted reference list and checks every entry against authoritative academic databases, flagging the ones that do not actually exist. It is built for students, professors, journal editors, and peer reviewers who need to catch fabricated or AI-generated references before a paper goes out or gets signed off.
Key Features
- Field-by-field verification: Each reference is broken into title, authors, year, DOI, venue, volume, and pages, and every field is compared against the matched record. A citation can point at a real paper and still be wrong.
- Wide database cross-referencing: The checker queries sources including Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, IEEE, Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier.
- Fake reference and DOI detection: References to papers that were never published, invented DOIs, and year drift from copy-paste or AI guesses all get surfaced with a confidence score per entry.
- Batch checking with format cleanup: Dozens or hundreds of references can be verified in one pass, and the tool normalizes messy input formatting before verifying.
- Beyond the browser: A Chrome extension, a Mac app, and API and MCP endpoints let researchers wire verification into their own workflow.
The site cites peer-reviewed evidence that 55 percent of GPT-3.5 generated citations were fabricated, so the pitch is grounded in a real problem. The free tier covers a set number of checks each day, while deeper verification runs on credits, which is worth checking against how many references a typical project carries.
