Why this is worth checking specifically
A fabricated reference doesn't look wrong. It has a plausible author, a real-sounding journal, a believable year, sometimes even a DOI-shaped string that resolves to nothing. Nothing about how it reads tells you it's fake; only checking whether it actually exists does.
For the fuller picture, why this happens, the research behind it, and documented real-world cases: see our page on AI-hallucinated citations. This page is the short version: check yours, now.
What gets checked, and what doesn't
- Existence, free. Every reference in your pasted list is checked against Crossref, OpenAlex, and DOAJ. If it doesn't resolve to a real source, it's flagged.
- Retraction status, free, same pass. A source can be real and still have been withdrawn since it was cited.
- Whether the source actually says what you claimed, paid, needs the full document. This is a real source cited for something it doesn't say, a different failure mode than a fabricated one, and catching it means reading the source text, not just confirming it exists. That's Acurio's full citation checker.
Who this is for
Anyone who used ChatGPT, or a similar tool, anywhere in their research process for a thesis, dissertation, or paper, even just to speed up a literature search. The fabrication risk doesn't depend on how much of the writing was AI-assisted; it only takes one invented source slipping into an otherwise fully human-written reference list.