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Paste a reference. Find out whether the paper actually exists — free, in seconds.
Note: the above demo utilizes only a fraction of our engine, and is not accessing the full set of SourceVerify algorithms. This instant check answers one question: real or not found among scholarly works.
SourceVerify checks references against the real published record — confirming a source exists, and that every detail about it is accurate, not just correctly formatted.
When you sign up for a free or paid account, your searches check against whole reference lists and PDFs, blog posts, news articles, and international reports. It also repairs wrong details, and shows the evidence behind every verdict.
The full product
Whole reference lists, PDF uploads, repaired errors, and evidence for every verdict — watch it work.
When a language model cites a source, it isn't looking anything up — it's guessing. Researchers keep measuring how often the guesses are wrong:
73.5%
Problematic references
of citations generated by major chatbots contained errors, omissions, or fabrications.
arXiv preprint, 202560%+
Confidently wrong
AI-powered news search engines collectively gave incorrect answers to more than 60% of queries.
Tow Center study, 202533%
Hallucinations in legal AI
Even specialized legal AI tools from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters hallucinate up to this rate.
Stanford/Yale study, 2025Everyone offers citation checking now — formatting tools, AI assistants, checkers built on the same technology that invents references in the first place. A checker that's wrong leaves you holding the bag.
Paste a fabricated citation into a free generator and it will format the fabrication perfectly — correct indentation, correct italics, correct APA. It has no mechanism for knowing the paper doesn't exist. It was never built to.
The fix isn't a more confident guess. It's verification you can independently confirm. Every SourceVerify verdict comes with its evidence — what we searched, what matched, links to the actual record — and the decision rules are published as an open standard, SVRIS, so you can check any outcome yourself. You don't have to take our word for it. That's the point.
Don't leave your reputation to probabilities.
25 free checks. No card required.
No black-box confidence scores. Every reference gets compared against real evidence, field by field.
Title, authors, year, venue, DOI — parsed from each reference in your list or PDF, any style.
Searching OpenAlex, Google Scholar, and other sources for the actual work — scholarly papers, and with an account, blog posts, news articles, and reports too.
Verified, verified with errors, needs human review, or unverified — with what matched, what didn't, and where we looked. Nothing is marked verified unless we find it.
No card required. Paid plans go up to 1,500 checks and 1,500 citation formattings per month.
Paste it, or upload the PDF — hundreds of references in a single pass.
Wrong year, misspelled author, missing DOI — we tell you what is wrong and what it should say.
Verified, verified with errors, needs human review, or unverified — plus what we checked and what matched. When we can't confirm something, we say so. We don't guess.
SourceVerify made the reference review process for our open call significantly faster and more reliable. We were dealing with a large volume of submissions, and the platform helped us efficiently verify references and quickly identify false or misleading entries that would have been difficult to catch manually. One of the most useful features was the ability to clearly see which references had supporting links and accessible source material versus those that did not. Having direct visibility into available links and verification status made it much easier to assess credibility at scale. The interface was straightforward to use, and the time savings were significant. It gave our team greater confidence in the integrity of the review process while reducing administrative workload. It's a particularly valuable tool for teams that need to review large numbers of applications or submissions while maintaining a high standard of due diligence.
Janani Balasubramaniam
Program Management Officer · IDRC
In a scientific world where GenAI detectors often fall short, SourceVerify has become my go-to tool for verifying sources and identifying hallucinations. I highly recommend it to scholars, journal editorial teams, educators, and journalists as a powerful resource for combating illegitimate or dishonest writing.
Dr. Carla Bonina
Associate Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship · University of Surrey
I've been using SourceVerify on some pretty extensive reference lists, and honestly, it's been a game-changer. Tracking down errors in hundreds of citations is tedious work, and this tool has cut that time down significantly. It's straightforward to use — no steep learning curve — and it catches things that are easy to miss when you're deep in a long document. I know the team is still building it out, and I'm looking forward to the additional features in the pipeline. It's already making a real difference, and I can only see it getting better from here.
Babak Fayyaz-Najafi, Ph.D.
NextGen Decarbon Consulting
SourceVerify gave me the confidence to use AI assistance for literature reviews by providing a crucial verification layer that catches citation errors before submission. While drafting papers for Three Sisters and preparing a symposium manuscript on AI governance in education, the tool identified both minor typos and serious hallucinations, including references with correct authors but wrong titles, shifted publication years, and venues that didn't match actual journals. What could have been embarrassing citation errors (and time-consuming to correct!) became learning opportunities, and now I wouldn't trust AI-generated references without running them through SourceVerify first.
Dr. Marcy O'Neil
Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Gender Equity and Social Inclusion Specialist, Global IDEAS · Michigan State University
In a world where it is increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction, SourceVerify is an indispensable tool that saves me hours of time.
Spencer Christopherson
Private Investor
SourceVerify made the reference review process for our open call significantly faster and more reliable. We were dealing with a large volume of submissions, and the platform helped us efficiently verify references and quickly identify false or misleading entries that would have been difficult to catch manually. One of the most useful features was the ability to clearly see which references had supporting links and accessible source material versus those that did not. Having direct visibility into available links and verification status made it much easier to assess credibility at scale. The interface was straightforward to use, and the time savings were significant. It gave our team greater confidence in the integrity of the review process while reducing administrative workload. It's a particularly valuable tool for teams that need to review large numbers of applications or submissions while maintaining a high standard of due diligence.
Janani Balasubramaniam
Program Management Officer · IDRC
In a scientific world where GenAI detectors often fall short, SourceVerify has become my go-to tool for verifying sources and identifying hallucinations. I highly recommend it to scholars, journal editorial teams, educators, and journalists as a powerful resource for combating illegitimate or dishonest writing.
Dr. Carla Bonina
Associate Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship · University of Surrey
Papers and theses are ramping back up. Get ahead of it now — 20% off any plan, on us.

25 free checks. No card required.
Nothing is marked verified unless we find it.