humanflow

Reference checker

Checks whether your document agrees with itself: every citation has an entry, every entry is cited, the years match. It cannot tell you a reference exists, because fabricated ones are perfectly well formed.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and there is no account or limit.

Last reviewed 15 August 2026 · The HumanFlow team

The body, with its citations. Author-year and numbered styles both work.

One reference per line. Nothing is sent anywhere.

What this checks, stated plainly

Whether your document agrees with itself. Every citation in the body should have an entry in the list; every entry in the list should be cited somewhere; the years should match; nothing should appear twice or carry a date that has not happened yet. All of that is mechanical, all of it is where real reference errors live, and none of it requires guessing.

What it cannot do is tell you a source exists. There is no lookup here, and there is a more uncomfortable reason than the technical one.

Why a format check cannot catch a fabricated citation

Because invented references are not malformed. A language model asked for a citation produces real-looking authors in the right order, a journal that exists, a plausible volume and issue, and a DOI with the correct prefix and shape. Every field is the right sort of thing. That is precisely why the fabrications get past a supervisor reading quickly — they look exactly like the twenty around them.

So a tool that scanned formatting and reported “all references valid” would be giving false reassurance in the one situation where people most need the truth. This one reports internal consistency and says, in the result panel, what a clean pass does not mean.

What to do instead

Open them. Search the title in a library catalogue or Google Scholar, paste the DOI into doi.org and see what resolves, and check that the paper says what you attributed to it. Ten minutes of that is worth more than any automated check, and it is the only method that actually establishes existence.

If this matters because you are answering a question about your work, the surrounding situation is covered in what to do when you are accused, and how to show you wrote it is about the evidence that carries weight. For the citation itself, how to cite an AI tool covers the formats the major styles have published, and the quote checker handles the other half of this problem — whether the words inside your quotation marks are the ones the source used.

Common questions

Will this tell me whether a reference is fake?
No, and treat any tool that claims otherwise with suspicion. Nothing here reaches the internet — no DOI resolution, no catalogue lookup — so it has no way to know whether a work exists. What it checks is whether your document agrees with itself.
Then how does it help with fabricated citations?
Indirectly, through the trace they usually leave. A reference invented mid-sentence often never reaches the list, or reaches it with a different year, because it was produced twice rather than copied once. Those inconsistencies are exactly what this finds. A fabrication that was carried through consistently will pass, which is why the result panel says so rather than declaring you clear.
Why can't a structural check catch a fabricated reference?
Because fabricated references are well formed. That is the whole reason they slip past a reader — plausible authors, a real journal, a plausible volume and a DOI with the correct shape. Every field is the right sort of thing. Format tells you nothing about existence, and the only way to establish that a source exists is to go and find it.
Which citation styles does it understand?
Author–year styles such as APA, Harvard and Chicago author–date, in both bracketed and narrative forms, and numbered styles such as IEEE and Vancouver. It picks the mode from what your text actually uses rather than asking you, and tells you which one it read.
It flagged a source I definitely cited. Why?
Usually a spelling or a year that differs by one between the sentence and the list, which is the error worth knowing about. It can also happen with an unusual author format — an organisation as author, or a surname with a particle — where the parser takes the wrong word as the surname. Read the flag as a prompt to look, not as a verdict.
Does an uncited entry matter?
It depends on the convention you are working to. A reference list is normally restricted to works actually cited, while a bibliography can include background reading, so an uncited entry is a fault in the first and perfectly fine in the second. The tool reports it either way and leaves the judgement to you.

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