StudyRef

What StudyRef does

Five tools. Four of them run in the browser with no account at all, because a student checking one assignment at midnight should not have to register to find out whether the word count is right.

• Assignment Checker

  Takes your assignment and the instructions you were given — a brief, a marking rubric or a guidelines document — and compares one against the other. Word limit, formatting, required sections, source counts and recency, and every in-text citation matched against your reference list in both directions.

• Word Count Checker

  Counts an academic document the way a brief asks for it, with the reference list, in-text citations, headings, tables, captions, footnotes and appendices excluded separately on request. It reads a .docx as the structured file it is rather than as plain text.

• Reference Checker

  Checks a reference list for format problems against the conventions of the style you select, and corrects what can be corrected deterministically.

• Citation Generator

  Builds a correctly formatted citation from the details of a source, in the style you choose.

• LaTeX Checker

  Resolves a LaTeX project's include graph and checks citation keys against the bibliography, and labels against cross-references. It reads the source; it does not run TeX.

What StudyRef deliberately does not do

This matters more than the feature list. A tool that reads coursework and stays vague about its limits is asking to be trusted for things it cannot do.

• It does not predict a grade or award a mark

  Not an unfinished feature — a deliberate absence. A predicted grade would be guessed at exactly the criteria the software has just reported it cannot assess, and presented with the same confidence as a word count. Your marker has not read it yet.

• It is not a plagiarism checker and not an AI detector

  StudyRef compares your document against the instructions you were given. It does not compare it against the web, against a database of other students' work, or against a model of how machines write.

• It is not a proofreader or a grammar checker

  It works at the level of requirements and references, not sentences. Whether a paragraph reads well is not a question it asks.

• It does not overrule your brief

  Whether the reference list counts towards your word limit, how many sources you need, what sections belong — those come from the document your institution gave you. StudyRef applies what you tell it and quotes the wording each finding came from.

• It says what it could not check

  A check that did not run is reported as not run, never as a pass. Where a source cannot be retrieved, the result says so and why. Silence is never allowed to read as approval.

Independence

StudyRef is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, accredited by or partnered with any university, college, examination board, publisher or referencing authority, and it does not speak for your institution. Where a StudyRef result and your own assignment brief disagree, your brief is correct and StudyRef is not.

Referencing style names — APA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver and others — are used only to describe which set of formatting conventions a check or a generated citation follows. No endorsement by the organisations behind those styles is claimed or implied.

What happens to a document you upload

A check run from a public tool page without an account is processed in memory and the result is returned. Nothing is written to a database, no copy of the file is kept, and no project is created — there is no account for one to belong to. Neither the text of your document nor its filename is sent to analytics.

When you are signed in, work is saved to your account so you can come back to it, and it is retained while that account is active. You can ask for your account and its data to be deleted by emailing support. The privacy policy is the full statement, including exactly which analytics events exist and how to decline them.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

The free checks use no AI at all. Word counts, formatting, required sections, citation and reference matching and LaTeX analysis are rule-based: both documents are in front of the software, and the answer is derived rather than generated.

The paid layers that judge whether a source suits a claim, and whether a source’s own text supports the sentence citing it, do use language models. Those answers are probabilistic. They come back as supported, partly supported, contradicted or not verifiable, with the passage they were judged against, so you can check the reasoning rather than take a verdict on faith — and where the source cannot be retrieved, the result says the claim could not be checked instead of guessing from a title.

Plans, payment and support

StudyRef offers a free plan plus paid Starter, Pro and (verification-gated) Pro Student subscriptions, and a one-time Full Assignment Scan that needs no subscription and no account. Paid features are unlocked only for the account that bought them. Payments and subscription status are handled by Stripe; StudyRef never sees or stores your card details. See the pricing page for current plans and the refund policy for how refunds work.

Legal business name

This service is operated as StudyRef.

Contact & policies

For support, billing, or business/Stripe verification questions, email support@mystudyref.com.