Reference Checker — Check whether your sources can be found

CiteMe parses your bibliography into individual references, then searches source records from services including CrossRef, OpenAlex, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, Google Books, and Europe PMC. It is strongest at checking whether a source exists. When a record is found, it also compares available fields, but field-level errors can still pass.

It can identify many fabricated references, but an unverified result is a review signal, not proof of fabrication. In a frozen 369-reference benchmark, none of 80 fabricated references was returned as verified; the explicit fabrication flag caught 68.8% of them and had a 2.4% false-positive rate on real references.

Yes. Without an account, you can run up to 5 checks per month on a shared IP quota, with at most 3 per day and 10 references per check. A Free account has its own 3-check monthly quota and accepts longer lists. Each report shows matches, review items, recorded lookup sources, and evidence. Pro removes the monthly limit and unlocks report export.

All major styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, ABNT, and more. The parser handles any common bibliography format.

Record found means the checker matched the reference to a scholarly source record. Review means the match is partial, non-indexed, grey literature, or has field differences. Highest priority means no match plus additional risk signals. None of these statuses replaces checking the original work.

Plagiarism checkers scan text for copied content. CiteMe's reference checker looks for source records behind the citations and surfaces metadata differences when it can. It does not prove that every author, year, title, or DOI field is correct. The tools answer different questions.