Submit your thesis without reference errors
Be sure before the committee is: does every source in your thesis exist, are DOI and metadata correct, is the bibliography in one consistent style? Paste or upload Word/PDF — faulty, fabricated and retracted sources are flagged, verified ones come back corrected.
Problems to catch before thesis submission
Fabricated or incorrect sources
Compare citations obtained from AI tools or secondary texts against open scholarly databases.
Broken DOI and metadata
Find conflicts in titles, authors, publication years, journals and DOI records.
Inconsistent formatting
Reformat verified records in APA 7, Vancouver, IEEE and other supported styles.
The 7 most common reference errors in theses
- A source cited in the text is missing from the list (or vice versa) — Chapters written at different times drift apart; the most frequent committee note.
- A fabricated entry from an AI assistant or a secondary source — Real author, plausible title, a DOI that does not resolve.
- Wrong year — Online-first papers mix 2020/2021; when a DOI record shows a different year, confirm which is right.
- Missing or wrong DOI — The record has a DOI but the list does not, or one character is off.
- Mixed style — 'et al.' in one entry, full author lists in another; some journal names italic, some not.
- Citing a retracted paper — The source is real but retracted; leaving it in a thesis draws serious criticism.
- No letters for same author–same year works — If Kaya (2022) points to two different works, 2022a/2022b are required.
A thesis research workflow
Explore the field and candidate gaps
Review publication trends, key papers and evidence-grounded research-gap candidates.
Build the literature review
Find relevant publications and assemble a traceable evidence base.
Verify the bibliography
Flag suspicious, retracted, duplicated or inaccurate references.
Check citation support
Assess whether cited sources actually support the claims in your text.
Thesis submission checklist
- Does every reference appear in the text?
- Do all DOI links resolve?
- Are author, year and title fields consistent?
- Does the bibliography contain retracted work?
- Does every entry follow the same citation style?
Decision support, not an absolute verdict
Results are grounded in Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed and other open scholarly records. Yellow and red results should be checked manually against the original publication or institutional record.