refproof

Are your references real?

refproof looks up every entry of your bibliography in Crossref, arXiv and OpenAlex. It flags references that do not exist, DOIs that point to someone else's paper, wrong authors or years, and retracted work.

Drop a file here .bib · .docx · .ris · .tex · .txt  —  or
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Your file stays in your browser. Only titles, authors and DOIs are sent to the public APIs of Crossref, DataCite and OpenAlex.

What it catches

Not found

No work with this title and these authors exists in Crossref, arXiv or OpenAlex. The typical invented reference.

Wrong DOI

The DOI is real but belongs to a different paper. refproof tells you the right one.

DOI not found

The DOI was never registered, often a typo or a made-up number.

Retracted

The paper was retracted or withdrawn, from Crossref and Retraction Watch data.

Mismatch

The paper exists, but the year, first author or title in your citation is wrong.

Unverified

Books, reports, theses and some non-English work are often not indexed, so they can't be confirmed.

How it works

  1. Read. BibTeX, RIS, LaTeX, pasted text and Word files. For Word it uses the data stored by Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote when present, and otherwise reads the typed reference list.
  2. Resolve. DOIs go to Crossref and to the DOI's own registration agency. References without a DOI are searched by title in Crossref, arXiv and OpenAlex.
  3. Compare strictly. A search hit counts only if its title, first author and year agree with your citation. Search engines always return something, so the top hit is never trusted blindly.

Command line and CI

pipx install refproof
refproof paper.bib
refproof manuscript.docx
refproof main.tex          # only the entries cited in main.tex

As a GitHub Action, it adds a comment to every wrong reference in the pull request:

- uses: maoji-y/refproof@v0
  with:
    files: paper/references.bib