Can it prove a citation was invented?

No, and it will not claim to. It reports what four registries and a web search know. Absence is evidence, not proof — and we say so in the response rather than rounding it up to a verdict.

Verification is billed as a resolved citation only when we match the entry to a record. Entries we cannot confirm are free — you pay for answers, not attempts.

Which styles does it accept?

Any. The entry goes in as text and is parsed on our side; APA, MLA, Chicago, numeric footnotes and messy hand-typed lists all work.

Check whether a citation is real, before a reviewer does

Send a bibliography entry. Get back verified, probable or unconfirmed, with the record we matched it to. We never call a reference fabricated — we tell you what we could and could not confirm.

Get a test key Documentation

Why this exists

Language models invent references that look perfect: plausible authors, a real-sounding journal, a page range. Nothing about the string reveals the problem, because the problem is not in the string — it is in the absence of the work behind it. Anyone shipping a product that writes citations now needs a way to tell one from the other before a reader does, and there is no way to do that by reading.

How the check works

1
We parse the entry
Authors, title, year, journal, pages — from free text, in whatever style it was written.
2
We look for the work itself
Crossref, OpenAlex, DOAJ and Google Books, then a web search where the registries are silent.
3
We report what we found
The matched record, its identifier and a confidence level — not a yes/no we cannot justify.

POST /api/ext/check-bibliography

A list of entries in, a verdict per entry out. Entries can be raw strings in any citation style — parsing is part of the job, not your problem.

curl -s -X POST https://cytado.com/api/ext/find-source \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CYTADO_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "a1",
      "claim": "Prokrastynacji towarzyszy poczucie winy i dyskomfort psychiczny.",
      "hint": "prokrastynacja u studentow"
    }
  ],
  "langs": [
    "pl"
  ],
  "harvestOnMiss": false
}'

Full reference, every field and error code →

Three states, and why there is no fourth

verified — we found the work and the metadata agrees. probable — we found something that matches on most fields but not all; the difference may be a typo in the entry or a variant record. unconfirmed — no registry knows it. We deliberately never return “fabricated”. Absence from four registries is strong evidence and still not proof: small local journals, older monographs and non-English publishing are under-indexed, and a tool that calls those fake would be wrong in exactly the cases where being wrong costs a reputation.

FAQ

Can it prove a citation was invented?: No, and it will not claim to. It reports what four registries and a web search know. Absence is evidence, not proof — and we say so in the response rather than rounding it up to a verdict.
What does it cost?: Verification is billed as a resolved citation only when we match the entry to a record. Entries we cannot confirm are free — you pay for answers, not attempts.
Which styles does it accept?: Any. The entry goes in as text and is parsed on our side; APA, MLA, Chicago, numeric footnotes and messy hand-typed lists all work.

Test it on a list you already suspect

A test key gives you 300 checks a month, never billed, no card. Paste the bibliography of something an LLM wrote and see what comes back.

Create an account

Looking for something else? Ground a sentence in a source that actually says it · A whole reference list · the API overview