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Reference checker

Check your reference list for formatting and citation-style problems before you submit. Paste up to 10 references, choose your style, and StudyRef shows what is wrong with each one — and rewrites it where the fix is safe to make. Free, and no account.

Up to 10 references, one per line. StudyRef splits the list itself — a reference wrapped over several lines is fine as long as entries are separated by a line break. Nothing is saved.

StudyRef does not guess the style — the rules genuinely differ, so pick the one your brief asks for.

What the reference checker looks at

StudyRef reads each reference as a structure, not as a string, and compares that structure against the rules of the style you chose. Different styles genuinely disagree — APA 7 dropped the publisher location APA 6 required, IEEE wants a bare DOI where APA wants a link — so the checks change with the style rather than approximating one from another.

Author names
Missing initials, initials punctuated the wrong way, “et al.” used in a reference list where the style wants every name, and the family-first / given-first inversion Chicago expects in a bibliography but not in a footnote.
Dates
A reference with no year at all, a year in a position the style does not use, and the “no date” label each style spells differently. Web sources in Harvard styles are also checked for the access date those styles require.
Titles and capitalisation
Whether the title looks like sentence case or title case, checked against what the style expects, and whether a source type that needs quotation marks around its title has them.
DOIs
Whether a DOI is written the way your style wants it — APA 7 as a full https://doi.org/ link, IEEE as a bare doi: label — and whether one is present where the style expects it.
URLs and access details
Protocol and prefix conventions, the “Retrieved from” wording APA 6 uses and APA 7 dropped, and whether an “Available at” and access date are present for the styles that require them.
Page ranges
Hyphen where the style wants an en dash, and the reverse. Small, tedious, and consistently marked down.
Publisher details
Whether a publisher location appears where the style expects one, and whether the elements of a book or chapter reference are in the order the style sets out.
Legal citations (AGLC4)
Checked by StudyRef's AGLC4 engine rather than the general rules, with the specific rule number reported alongside each finding — and with the citation context you choose, because a bibliography entry and a footnote genuinely differ.

Three things it does not do, so you know where the edges are: it does not check the alphabetical order of the list, it does not compare one entry with another to find duplicates, and it cannot match your references against the in-text citations — that needs the body of the document, which a pasted list does not contain.

How corrections work

Where a fix is mechanical, StudyRef makes it and shows you the corrected reference ready to copy. “Mechanical” is a real constraint, not a hedge: rewriting a bare DOI as a link, swapping a hyphen for an en dash, or stripping a protocol from a URL each change the form of something already in your reference and invent nothing.

Where a fix would require inventing information — a missing year, an author's initials, the official capitalisation of a title — StudyRef stops and tells you what is missing instead. A checker that guesses at a date is worse than one that says the date is absent, because you would have no way to know which references it made up.

AGLC4 works differently and better: legal citations are re-rendered by StudyRef's own AGLC4 formatter, so the correction is a complete citation rather than a patched one — except where the citation is genuinely ambiguous, in which case none is offered.

Formatting checks are not source verification

These are two different questions, and conflating them is how a tool ends up accusing a student of fabricating a real source.

Formatting and structure

Does this reference have the shape the style requires? Answerable from the text alone, with no external lookup. This is what the free checker does, completely.

Source verification

Does this source exist, and do the details match? Answerable only by resolving the DOI, ISBN or URL against the registry or the page itself. The free checker makes no such request, so it never answers this.

So a reference can be perfectly formatted and entirely invented, or badly formatted and completely real. When StudyRef says a reference has no formatting issues, that is the whole claim: its shape matches the style. It is not a statement that the work exists, that the authors wrote it, or that it was ever published.

This matters most for references produced by an AI assistant, which are usually formatted impeccably and sometimes describe papers that were never written. A formatting checker is the wrong instrument for that problem, and this one will not pretend otherwise.

Citation styles StudyRef can check

10 styles, each with its own rules rather than a shared approximation. Pick the one your brief names — StudyRef will not guess, because checking a Harvard reference against APA rules produces confident, wrong answers.

  • APA 6th
  • APA 7th
  • MLA 8th
  • MLA 9th
  • Harvard
  • Harvard Australia
  • Chicago 18th Author-Date
  • Chicago 18th Notes
  • AGLC4
  • IEEE

Harvard is a family of house styles rather than one published standard, so StudyRef checks the conventions its variants share and offers an Australian variant separately. Where your institution's own Harvard guide differs on a detail, your guide wins.

The problems that show up most

The DOI is written as a bare number
APA 7 wants a resolvable https://doi.org/ link. IEEE wants the opposite — a bare doi: label with no URL. StudyRef corrects either direction automatically, because the change is mechanical and nothing has to be guessed.
“et al.” has been carried into the reference list
It belongs in the in-text citation. Most styles want every author named in the list, up to the style's own cut-off, and a reference list that shortens them is a common and easy mark to lose.
The page range uses a hyphen
Most styles want an en dash. It is invisible until someone is checking, and then it is on every entry at once. Auto-corrected.
There is no date, and no “no date” marker either
A reference with a missing year is flagged, but StudyRef will not invent one. It tells you the year is missing and how your style writes “no date” when there genuinely is not one.
The title case does not match the style
Sentence case and title case are not interchangeable, and different styles want different ones for different parts of a reference. This is raised as a suggestion rather than an error, because a title can legitimately carry proper nouns that make it look title-cased.
A web source has no access date
Harvard variants require one. StudyRef flags the absence for the styles that ask for it, and stays quiet for the styles that do not.

Reference checker or citation generator?

They solve opposite halves of the same problem. A citation generator starts from a source and produces a reference: you give it an author, a title and a year — or a DOI — and it writes the entry for you. A reference checker starts from a reference you already have and tells you what is wrong with it.

Use the generator while you are writing and adding sources. Use the checker at the end, on the list you already have, especially if it was assembled from several places over several weeks — which is when styles drift and half a list ends up in the wrong one.

“Citation checker” usually means this page: people mean checking the references and citations they already have, not generating new ones. StudyRef does not keep a separate page for the phrase, because it would be the same tool under a different name.

What StudyRef does when it is not sure

A checker that reports everything it is unsure about as an error is worse than useless — a student who is told twenty things are wrong when four are will fix nothing. StudyRef separates what it proved from what it suspects, and says which is which.

  • Issue found — a rule of the chosen style is broken. Objective, and worth fixing.
  • Probably wrong — the style usually wants something different, but a legitimate exception exists. A title that looks title-cased may be carrying proper nouns.
  • Suggestion — an improvement, not a defect.
  • Not assessed— StudyRef declined to reach a verdict, because the reference is a source type outside the checker's scope for that style or is genuinely ambiguous. Neither a pass nor a failure, and never presented as either.

You will never see “invalid”, “fake” or “does not exist” from the free checker, because those are claims about the world that need evidence from outside your text — and it does not go looking.

What an account adds

Everything the free checker finds, it shows you. An account does not unblur a result or unlock a correction that was already computed — it adds work the free tool deliberately does not do.

Source verification
DOIs, ISBNs and URLs are resolved against the registry or the page itself, and the title, authors and year that come back are compared field by field with what your reference claims. This is the layer the free checker does not run, and it is the reason it cannot tell you whether a source is real.
A whole reference list at once
100 references in a single check on the free account, rather than 10.
References saved with a project
Starter and above keep reference lists in projects and re-check a saved list without pasting it again.
BibTeX and LaTeX
Starter and above import a .bib file or a LaTeX project and check the reference list from inside it, including cross-reference integrity.
Create a free accountSee what each plan includes

Reference checker FAQ

What does a reference checker actually do?
StudyRef reads each reference in your list and compares its shape against the rules of the citation style you choose — where the author's initials go, how the date is written, whether the title is sentence case or title case, how the DOI or URL should appear, whether the page range uses a hyphen or an en dash. It reports what does not match, explains why, and rewrites the reference for you where the fix is safe to make automatically. It checks up to 10 references at a time, free and without an account.
Can StudyRef check APA references?
Yes — APA 7 and APA 6 are both supported, and they are checked against different rules rather than one approximating the other. APA 7 dropped the publisher location and the “Retrieved from” wording that APA 6 used, and StudyRef checks each edition for what that edition actually asks for.
Can StudyRef check Harvard references?
Yes. Harvard is a family of house styles rather than one standard, so StudyRef checks the conventions those variants share — author-date shape, quoted titles where required, “Available at” and an access date for web sources — and offers an Australian Harvard variant separately. Where your institution's Harvard guide differs on a detail, follow your guide.
Can StudyRef tell me whether a reference is fake?
No, and the free checker will never claim to. Deciding that a source does not exist means looking it up in an external database, and this tool does not make any external request at all — it reads the text you paste and nothing else. A reference can be perfectly formatted and invented, or badly formatted and completely real, and StudyRef only speaks to the formatting. If a reference passes the check, that means its shape matches the style, not that the source is genuine.
Does StudyRef verify that the source exists?
Not in the free public checker. Resolving a DOI, fetching a URL or looking up an ISBN are network requests to third parties, and StudyRef does not make them for anonymous visitors. Signed-in accounts get that layer: DOI, ISBN and URL resolution, with the fetched title, authors and year compared field by field against what your reference claims.
Why only 10 references at a time?
Parsing and re-checking every entry is server work, and the free tool has no account behind it to attribute that work to. 10 keeps it responsive for everyone. A free account raises it to 100 in one check, which is a whole reference list for most assignments.
Can I check a whole reference list?
Paste the list and StudyRef splits it into individual references itself — you do not need to submit them one at a time. Above 10 references it asks you to check in batches or create a free account, and it tells you before it checks anything rather than quietly analysing part of your list.
Does StudyRef store my references?
No. The free checker keeps nothing. Your references are held in memory long enough to check them, the result is sent back to your browser, and nothing is written to a database or a file. There is no account attached to the request, nothing to look up later, and nothing sent to any third party.
Do I need an account?
No. Paste your references, choose a style, and you get the full result — every issue found and every correction StudyRef can safely make. Nothing is computed and then hidden behind a sign-up. An account raises the limit and adds source verification; it does not unlock a result you have already been shown.
What is the difference between a citation generator and a reference checker?
A citation generator builds a reference from a source's details — you supply the author, title and year, or a DOI, and it writes the reference. A reference checker starts from a reference you already have and tells you what is wrong with it. Use the generator when you are adding a source; use the checker when you are about to submit.