Are these citations real?
Paste a reference list or a brief. Every citation is looked up, and you see which ones exist, which point to something else, and which you need to check by hand.
Why check citations at all
AI tools write references that look right: real-sounding authors, a plausible journal, a DOI in the right format. Sometimes the work doesn't exist. Sometimes it does, but the DOI or the case citation belongs to something else entirely, and that is harder to spot because the citation itself is real.
It happens after editing too. In a Connecticut case this year, a lawyer checked every citation, then asked an AI tool to polish the brief, and the polish changed the citations. Read what happened.
Questions
Does "not found" mean a citation is fake?
No. It means the database we checked has no matching record. Crossref covers most journal articles with a DOI but not every book, report or journal, and CourtListener covers most published US case law but not every unpublished or very recent decision. Treat "not found" as "check this one by hand".
What kinds of mistakes does it catch?
A DOI that doesn’t exist, a DOI that belongs to a different paper, a year or first author that doesn’t match the record, an ISBN for a different book, a case citation that doesn’t exist, and a real case citation attached to the wrong case name. These are the errors AI tools most often introduce.
What doesn’t it check?
Whether a source says what you cite it for. Web pages, statutes, law review articles, and "id." and "supra" references aren’t looked up. Read every source you rely on.
Where does my text go?
Academic references are looked up in Crossref and Open Library straight from your browser. Legal text is sent through our server to CourtListener, a free legal research database run by the non-profit Free Law Project. We don’t store either. For a confidential brief, paste only the citations.
Need to write a reference first? Use the citation generator. Case data from CourtListener (Free Law Project); article data from Crossref.
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