Reference list check — free tool | akademskosavjetovanje.eu

The reference list is the part of a paper that gets looked at last, and the easiest place to lose a mark. It is not about content but about formalities: an entry with no year, the same work recorded twice, a list that is not in alphabetical order, half the entries with the year in brackets and half without. A supervisor sees all of that on a first flick through.

Paste your list and the tool goes through it entry by entry and counts what does not add up. The tool does not correct the list — it shows where the problems are and how many there are, and the decision is yours.

What the tool checks

Every check runs in your browser, on the list you pasted:

Entries with no year. The year is required in every citation style, and it is the detail most often left out when an entry is copied from a web page.
Entries that do not begin with a surname. An entry normally begins with the author surname or the name of an institution. When it begins with a title, the order of the details is usually wrong.
Repeated entries. The same first author and the same year in two places. If these really are two different works by the same author in the same year, the styles require a, b, c after the year — the tool flags it so you can check.
Alphabetical order. The tool shows the first place where the order breaks, because everything after it shifts anyway.
Consistency of formatting. Whether the connector between authors is always the same (& or and), whether the year is in brackets everywhere or nowhere, whether an entry ends with a full stop. The tool counts how many entries use one convention and how many the other, and reports only what is actually mixed.
Online sources with no access date. Most styles ask for the date the page was visited alongside the link.
Age of the literature. What share of the sources is from the last five years. Supervisors usually expect at least half; older literature is fine for foundational works, but a list in which everything is more than ten years old tends to come back for revision.

Checking DOIs against Crossref

If there are DOIs in the list, the tool extracts them and offers to check them. Only when you click the check yourself are they sent to the Crossref database, and each one comes back with one of three answers: the record exists and the year matches, the record exists but the year is different, or the record was not found.

A year mismatch usually means you entered the year of the print issue while the DOI belongs to the online version published a year earlier — or the other way round. A DOI that is not found has normally been copied with a typo.

What is sent to the server Only the DOIs, and only after you click. The rest of the list never leaves your browser. At most twenty-five DOIs are checked at a time.

What the tool does not do

It does not check whether an entry is formatted exactly according to the style your faculty prescribes, it does not correct the list for you, and it does not fill in missing details. It finds inconsistencies and gaps; you can build the formatting of an individual entry in the citation generator.

The values your institution prescribes are on the Faculty rules page. If you also want to know whether the list matches what is actually cited in the paper, there is a separate citation check.