Paperpile Citation Checker

How to use the Paperpile Citation Checker

The Paperpile Citation Checker is a free tool to double-check your reference list for accuracy and correctness.

Use this tool to check submissions before you submit a manuscript to a preprint server or journal. Share a link with your coauthors to give them confidence that your manuscript contains accurate & legitimate literature references.

Features:

• Free, fast & accurate citation checks. Usually < 1 minute for a 50-reference BibTeX file.
• Quickly share a link with your coauthors or supervisor.
• Per-reference report with match status & metadata updates.
• Download a BibTeX file with updated metadata and consistent formatting.

What you’ll see in the citation report

As the citation checker works, results will appear in real time. Each row corresponds to one entry in your input BibTeX file.

The results display is designed to help you quickly scan for entries that need special attention or fixes:

• Unmatched entries are highlighted in red.
• Metadata updates are displayed as colored chips:
  • The tool will incorporate updated metadata from the matching record in Paperpile’s internal literature database or Semantic Scholar.
  • Enrichments are newly-added metadata fields.
  • Metadata edits are changes to one or more existing fields in the BibTeX record.
  • Impactful edits, such as author, journal, or title, are prominently marked.
• Nonacademic references (typically software or dataset entries) are skipped.
  • These entries are rarely present in standard bibliographic databases. Including them in the verification flow would lead to many false positives.

You can download the entire updated BibTeX file, or copy individual updated records.

Sharing the citation report with coauthors

Click the “Copy link to share” button to copy a link to the current results.

Share with your coauthors to give them confidence that you haven’t missed any details.

Other citation checker tools

• https://gptzero.me/sources – free tool (max 10,000 characters).
• https://citeme.app/tools/reference-checker – free tool (5 checks per month).
• https://www.bibtexchecker.com/checker – free tool (20 checks).
• https://merfanian.github.io/Bibtex-Verifier/ - free tool (runs from your browser).
• https://citesurely.com/ – free tool.
• https://citetrue.com/ – paid tool (free limit of 30 citations).

Frequently asked questions

How does Paperpile’s Citation Checker work?

• For each record in your BibTeX file, the system runs a series of database searches to find the best-matching journal article, book, chapter, conference presentation, or preprint.
• The system compares each candidate match against your input record. The first candidate with sufficiently high similarity is considered a matching record.
• Each metadata field of the matching reference is compared to your input record. New fields are marked as “enrichments” and edited fields as “edits”.
  • Fields that are present in your input record but absent in the database-matched reference are left as-is.
  • Some metadata differences are ignored in certain circumstances. This helps reduce noise for input records that follow standard practice for preprints or conference papers, even if they are technically not aligned with publicly-accessible bibliographic metadata.

What sources of bibliographic metadata are used?

• Paperpile’s literature database contains records aggregated from primary literature metadata sources including PubMed, CrossRef, Nielsen, arXiv, and Europe PMC.
• The system also routes searches to Semantic Scholar for title-based matching.

What is Autocomplete mode?

When an input record has very little metadata, the system will treat it as an “autocomplete” request. The title or note field will be used to search against bibliographic databases, find the best possible match among search results, and return a complete BibTeX record for that reference.

With Autocomplete mode, you can use Paperpile’s Citation Checker to look up and return papers given an author-year string or a partial title.

How long will my results be stored?

Reports are stored for 90 days before being auto-deleted.

For a permanent research library that works great with BibTeX, LaTeX and writing tools like Overleaf, we recommend Paperpile. Try it for free at https://paperpile.com.

Where can I learn more about BibTeX?

We love BibTeX at Paperpile—so much that we created https://www.bibtex.com/. There you’ll find a variety of formatting tools, plus a reference guide with everything you ever wanted to learn about BibTeX.