Paste your reference list. Every entry is checked against CrossRef and OpenAlex, and you get one of four verdicts per line rather than a blunt real or fake. Sources that simply are not indexed are told apart from sources that do not exist, because getting that distinction wrong is what makes a checker useless.
The verification pipeline is not connected yet.
A checker that only says real or fake is worse than no checker, because it flags every legitimate source it has never heard of.
Verified
The identifier resolves and the author, year and title match the database record.
Metadata mismatch
The work exists, but the year, volume, issue or author list does not match. The differing fields are highlighted.
Cannot confirm
No record was found, which is common for book chapters, grey literature and non-English journals. This is not the same as fabricated.
Likely does not exist
Nothing matches across any source, or the DOI resolves to a different work entirely.
Yes. Paste a reference list and check it without an account. Nothing you paste is stored, because unpublished work is often pasted into tools like this one.
Because open databases do not index everything. Book chapters, dissertations, conference abstracts, government reports and many non-English journals are missing from CrossRef and OpenAlex. Calling those fabricated would be wrong, so they get their own verdict.
It catches the common failure mode, where a real-sounding title, author and journal are combined into a record that does not exist. Those come back as likely does not exist. It also catches the subtler case where a real paper is cited with the wrong year or volume.
CrossRef and OpenAlex for journal articles and conference papers, with OpenLibrary and Google Books for monographs. Results are cached by identifier, not by the text you paste.
The generator formats a reference from a DOI, ISBN, link or PDF in any of these styles.