Citation check

The most common formal complaint a supervisor writes on a paper is not style or content, but a mismatch between the text and the reference list: a source cited in the text that is missing from the list, or an entry in the list that is never mentioned in the paper. Both are easy to overlook and both are easy to check.

Paste the text of your paper and your reference list, and the tool compares the two and shows what does not match. The tool does not correct the list — it shows where the differences are, and the decision is yours.

What the tool checks

• Cited in the text, missing from the list. Supervisors almost always catch this, because it shows on a first reading.
• In the list, never cited. A reference list may only contain sources actually used in the paper. Committees do ask at the defence where exactly you used a particular book.
• Same entry, different year. When the text says 2019 and the list says 2020, it is usually a typo — but sometimes they really are two editions.
• Repeated entries in the list and entries with no year, which cannot be matched.

Two kinds of citation

Choose the one your faculty prescribes, because citations are recognised differently:

• Author–date — APA, Harvard, Chicago author–date, MLA. The tool looks for forms such as (Horvat, 2021), Horvat (2021), (Horvat et al., 2019, p. 12) and several sources separated by semicolons.
• Numeric — Vancouver and IEEE. The tool looks for forms such as [1], [1, 2] and [1–3], expanding ranges into individual numbers.

You can check the values your institution prescribes on the Faculty rules page, and build the reference itself in the citation generator.

What the tool does not do

It does not check whether a reference is formatted correctly for the style, it does not correct the list for you, and it does not verify that a source really exists. It compares only what the text says with what the list says.

The text you paste stays in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is stored.