Reference Audit and Verification

Reference errors are a common reason a manuscript comes back

A reference list is the easiest part of a paper to get wrong and the hardest to check by eye. Volume numbers drift, DOIs go missing, a citation points at a reference that is no longer there, and journal style is applied inconsistently across forty entries.

We check every entry against the published record, repair what is wrong, and hand you back your own document with the reference section corrected in place — body content and structure untouched.

What we check

• Verification — each reference matched against the published record, with missing DOIs recovered where they exist
• Retraction screening — citations checked so a retracted paper is not carried into your submission unnoticed
• Citation reconciliation — every in-text citation matched to a reference and back again; orphans and mismatches listed
• Journal style — the reference list normalised to your target journal conventions
• Confidence scoring — every reference classified from verified through to unverified, so you know which ones to look at

The rule that matters most

We never invent a missing bibliographic detail. If a reference cannot be confirmed, it is raised as an issue for a person to resolve — never quietly completed to make the list look tidy. A reference list that is confidently wrong is worse than one that is visibly incomplete.

Work that cannot leave your control

For confidential, embargoed or pre-submission material we run a mode that performs its checks entirely on the file, with no network calls at all. The document is not transmitted anywhere. Verification against the published record is unavailable in that mode, for the obvious reason — the trade-off is yours to make, and we will tell you which you are getting.

What you receive

• Your corrected document — reference section repaired in place
• An audit report — what changed, what was verified, what needs your attention
• A findings register — one row per issue, with severity and confidence
• Machine-readable output — for teams integrating this into an existing workflow

For departments and publishers

We can encode your house reference rules as a named profile and apply it identically to every manuscript, and screen a whole submission batch before it reaches an editor, with a summary across the set.

Scope

Available as an add-on to editing or translation, or on its own. Vancouver and APA are fully supported; other styles receive conservative normalisation. We do not publish an accuracy figure, because we have not measured one — what we can show you is the audit trail for your own document.

Related services:

Reference and citation checking. The tools behind the service.