What to Do When a Citation Fails a Check

A failed check is not the same as a fabricated reference. There are two distinct outcomes: a partial match (the source is real but one field is wrong) and no match at all (nothing in the literature resembles it). Your next move depends entirely on which one you are looking at.

• Partial match — the title and authors line up, but the year, DOI, volume, or page range disagrees with the real record.
• No match — the title returns nothing anywhere, the DOI does not resolve, and the authors never published this work.

When the checker found a near-match, the reference is real and just needs the wrong field corrected. Fix the specific field rather than rewriting the whole entry:

• Replace the DOI with the one from the matched record.
• Correct the year, volume, issue, or page range to match the real paper.
• Fix author order or spelling to match the published byline.

If the reference came from a chatbot and has no real match, do not try to patch it — the underlying source does not exist. Instead, find the real work you meant to cite and regenerate the citation from a real identifier: a DOI, URL, title, or ISBN. Editing fabricated text only produces a tidier fabrication.

After fixing one entry, re-run the full reference list. Corrections often reveal that neighbouring references share the same source error — a batch pasted from the same bad document, for instance. Once every reference verifies, reformat the list in a single style so the formatting is as consistent as the sources are now accurate.