Citation Gap Finder

Catch citation errors in your thesis before your supervisor does.

Catch the citation errors in your thesis before your supervisor does. Citation Gap Finder is a Chrome extension built for graduate students, post-docs, and academic researchers who can't afford to ship sloppy references. In 30 seconds, it cross-checks every citation in your Google Docs or Overleaf document against your reference list and produces a structured report of: • Orphan citations — cited in your text but missing from your reference list (the most common reason for desk rejection) • Unused references — listed in your bibliography but never actually cited in the body • Broken DOIs — malformed identifiers, placeholder strings like "doi: pending", or anything else that won't resolve Supports five citation styles out of the box: Vancouver, APA, Harvard, Chicago footnote, and IEEE. Auto-detects the style for most documents; asks you to pick when ambiguous. Privacy-first by design: • Zero AI runtime — every check is deterministic regex parsing, not a language model on a remote server • Your document is never sent to our servers or any third party • For Google Docs specifically, we read your text via Google's own File → Download → Plain Text endpoint — your data round-trips inside Google and never reaches us • No cloud upload, no document text retention, no AI training How it works: 1. Open your document in Google Docs or Overleaf 2. Click the Citation Gap Finder icon in your Chrome toolbar 3. Click Run Check 4. Read the structured report — fix issues in 20 minutes instead of 4 hours Word for the web support is on the roadmap for v1.1. Word's editor virtualises pages on demand, which makes reliable end-to-end extraction from a browser extension hard; we'd rather ship Google Docs and Overleaf working perfectly than ship Word half-working. 7-day free trial with full functionality. After the trial, $7/month or $39/year keeps it active. Cancel anytime. Built by Dr. Rafiq Muhammad, PhD — author of the Mastering Research book series. Reply to support emails goes to a real person; bug fixes ship within days. Not affiliated with Google or Overleaf.