Style check and “Accept and replace”

Style check goes further than Existence check: accept the corrected values in one click and they replace your original text.

What it is

Existence check answers one question: does this reference exist? Style check goes further. It compares every field of a reference against the authoritative record. If a field doesn't match, it gives you the record's value. If a required field is missing, it gives you a value to fill it in. You can accept either with one click. If the style is recognized as Other, it can't be selected, and only the Existence check is run.

Parsed references

Existence check1 / referenceStyle check1 / reference

3 refs · Style check・APA 7・

Upload a file (*.docx, *.bib, *.txt, *.ris, *.enw)

When to use it

Before submitting a paper: the most common kind of revision comment from journals is that references are incomplete or don't match the journal's records.
Before a thesis defense: run the whole reference list through the citation style your school requires.
When you use references from AI or from someone else's draft: a real title paired with the wrong author, or a real journal paired with the wrong year, volume, or pages, is hard to spot by eye.

How to read the results

There are four results: Verified, Needs fixing, Unconfirmed, and Not found.

Verified

The reference matches the database record, and all the fields required by the target citation style are present. If the record differs slightly from your text but the reference is still clearly the same work (for example, the page-range hyphen or the abbreviated form of an author's name), it is still Verified, and the difference is explained in a footnote. If both the online-first year and the issue year are valid, it is also Verified, and you get a Keep / Use switch. By default, your original text is kept.

01LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436-444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

FoundComplete

Deep learning

Needs fixing

The reference matches a database record, but one or more fields differ from the record, or a field required by the target citation style is missing from your text. The card expands into a panel that lists the database values. Click Accept and the record's value replaces your original text. Differences that don't affect identification are explained in a footnote.

01Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440-442. https://doi.org/10.1038/30819

FoundDOI discrepancy

Best match

Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440–442. https://doi.org/10.1038/~~30819~~30918

Source

Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks

Common causes: a misspelled title or author name, fields in the wrong place, or fields that are incomplete for the target citation style.

Unconfirmed

There are leads, but not enough to confirm that this is the reference you cited. This result also appears when the reference is confirmed but the record itself has no value for a field the target citation style requires (for example, a preprint has no journal name). In that case, no corrected value can be given for that field.

01Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K., Silver, D., Graves, A., Antonoglou, I., Wierstra, D., & Riedmiller, M. (2013). Playing Atari with deep reinforcement learning. In NIPS Deep Learning Workshop.

FoundConference unconfirmed

Conference: NIPS Deep Learning Workshop unconfirmed
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602v1

Conference appears only in the preprint's author Comments note.

Not found

None of the databases returned a match. The result shows up to three Possibly related leads.

01Hartley, M., & Okafor, D. (2019). Attention routing in sparse transformer networks. Journal of Machine Intelligence, 12(3), 45-58.

Not found

Not found in public databases. This entry may be fabricated or not indexed. We recommend checking it manually.

Search manually:Google Scholar Semantic Scholar

Accept and replace

Click Accept and replace. The record's value is written into that reference right away, and it is marked Accepted. Click again to undo. Your original text stays untouched until you accept. When you export the reference list, it contains the accepted values.

01Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440-442. https://doi.org/10.1038/30819

FoundDOI discrepancy

Best match

Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440–442. https://doi.org/10.1038/~~30819~~30918

Source

Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks

Saving credits

In general, use Existence check while you write or after AI generates references. Run Style check on the reference list only once, in the target citation style, just before you submit the final version.

Check your references before you submit

Start checking

10 basic credits every day, reset at 16:00 UTC

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