Fake Citation Detector

Free, no account. Check if the sources in a bibliography really exist and catch AI-invented references. By DiFlowRin.

Paste a bibliography, or right-click any reference on a page, and see in seconds which sources really exist. AI tools invent references that look perfect: real-sounding titles, real journals, real author names. They have even reached papers accepted at top conferences. Fake Citation Detector looks every reference up in the public academic databases and tells you what it found. ✓ Confirmed: the work exists and the details match ⚠ Wrong details: the work exists, but the year, authors, journal or DOI in your citation differ (shown side by side) ? Not confirmed: no good match. Never labelled "fake": some real sources (old books, local journals, reports) are not indexed, so you get links to check by hand What it does • Checks up to 100 references at once, or a single one from the right-click menu • Checks the sources of the article you are reading: its reference list and its DOI, arXiv and PubMed links, each shown next to the sentence that cites it • Checks web sources too: reports, policies, news and blog posts are opened and compared with the citation; dead links are looked up in the Internet Archive • Understands the common citation styles, as well as BibTeX and RIS exports • Looks each reference up in several free academic databases, such as Crossref and PubMed • Detects DOIs that don't exist or belong to another paper • Copies the corrected reference in the citation style you choose • Exports a report (TXT or CSV) for teachers, supervisors and editors • Interface in English and Romanian 100% free, no limits, no account Checks run in your browser, straight against public databases. There is no server of ours and no analytics. Optional AI (your own key) Add an OpenRouter key to let AI read messy or incomplete references and explain each verdict in your language. You choose the model (a cheap one by default), you pay OpenRouter directly, and the extension shows the estimated cost before a large check. The key stays in your browser. Does the source say what you claim? This extension checks that a source exists. It does not check whether the source supports your sentence. For that, the author of this extension makes DiFlowRin Research, a Windows app that checks every citation against the text of its source. The extension shows a small, dismissible card about it after results.