A hallucinated citation looks complete — authors, journal, year, pages, sometimes a DOI — and still points at a paper that was never published. RefCheck looks the citation up instead of trusting the formatting.
Each reference is parsed, then searched in Crossref and OpenAlex. Biomedical items also go to PubMed and Europe PMC. Preprints go to arXiv, computer-science items to DBLP, datasets to DataCite, and books to Open Library and Google Books.
When several databases agree, the verdict is real. When the title, authors, or year disagree with the record, RefCheck marks the citation as real with errors and writes a corrected reference. When nothing matches, it is marked likely fabricated.
A real paper can still be unsafe to cite. Retraction signals come from Retraction Watch data in Crossref, plus retraction flags from PubMed and Europe PMC. The card names the source of the notice.
Paste the whole reference list on the checker, or check a single reference first. Signed-out use is 5 references a day. After that, each reference is 1 shared AILatest credit.
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