Your bibliography
shouldn't be a liability.

Citation Master takes an academic document you’ve already written — an essay, thesis chapter, dissertation, or research paper — and verifies every citation in it against global academic databases. It extracts your footnotes or endnotes, identifies what each source is supposed to be, searches for that source across Crossref, OpenAlex, Google Books, and the open web, and tells you which citations it could confirm and which it could not. For every verified citation, it also reformats the entry according to your chosen citation style. You get back revised in-text footnotes and a clean, formatted bibliography.

It does one thing, and it does it carefully: it tells you whether your sources check out.

Citation Master works from footnotes or endnotes — specifically, footnotes created using your word processor’s built-in footnote tool (Insert → Footnote in Word). The system reads each footnote, identifies the source it refers to, and verifies it.

Two important requirements: First, your document must contain footnotes or endnotes with citations. A document with only in-text citations (author-date style) or a standalone bibliography cannot be processed. Second, we do not process a bibliography alone — the footnotes are the input.

If your document already has a bibliography, Citation Master will detect it and use the entries as additional context to improve matching accuracy. But the bibliography alone is not sufficient.

A citation is marked verified when Citation Master has found independent evidence that the source exists as described. This means locating a record in at least one authoritative database or on the web that matches the key metadata fields in your citation: the author’s name, the title of the work, the year of publication, the journal or publisher, and (where applicable) a DOI or stable identifier.

Verification is not a simple keyword match. The system compares structured metadata field by field and evaluates evidence from multiple sources before making a decision. A citation is only marked verified when the evidence crosses a confidence threshold.

What verification does not mean: we are not checking whether the passage you cited accurately represents what the source says. We verify that the source exists and that your citation describes it correctly. Interpretive accuracy is outside the scope of what Citation Master does.

Citations that fail verification are flagged in your results. You will see them clearly marked in the output alongside the citations that passed. You are not charged for failed verifications.

Failure does not necessarily mean your citation is wrong. Common reasons for failure include: the source is a manuscript, archival document, or local publication not indexed in any database; the source is very old and pre-dates digital cataloguing; the publication is in a language or region underrepresented in global academic APIs; or the citation contains a significant error that prevented a match.

When a citation fails, Citation Master notes the reason to the extent it can determine one. It is then your responsibility to verify that citation by hand.

Citation Master currently supports Chicago Notes & Bibliography, MLA 9th edition, and Harvard. Additional styles are planned.

If you upload a document formatted in a style other than these, Citation Master can still extract and verify your citations — it will just reformat them into whichever of the supported styles you select at the time of upload.

Yes — and it is worth being precise about what “AI assistance” means here.

If you used an AI writing tool — such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or a similar assistant — to help draft your document, Citation Master handles your footnotes exactly as it would for any document. It reads each footnote, attempts to locate the source in authoritative databases and across the web, and flags any citation it cannot confirm. Citations generated by AI writing tools are sometimes fabricated, sometimes correct, and sometimes subtly wrong in authorship, year, or title. Citation Master will surface those problems and return unconfirmed citations at no charge.

This is the appropriate use of Citation Master in that scenario: not to approve what an AI writing tool produced, but to independently verify whether each source actually exists and is described accurately.

What Citation Master itself does not do is use AI to guess or generate citations on your behalf. Our own verification relies on structured database lookups and targeted web evidence — not on a language model’s memory or pattern matching.

Your document is uploaded to process your citations and retained privately in your account so you can return later, view your history, and download your original or processed document.

Your documents are processed using third-party AI APIs. Under current API terms, submitted data is not used to train AI models. Citation Master also does not use your document content for AI training.

When you delete a document, library, or account, we delete the private document files, generated outputs, process logs, and private archives for that content. We may retain anonymized aggregate verification analytics that no longer identify you or your document.

If your document contains sensitive research data or unpublished findings and you have concerns about uploading it, we recommend using a version of the document with placeholder content in the body text, keeping only the footnotes and bibliography intact. Citation Master works from your footnotes — the body text is largely incidental to the verification process.

In internal testing on humanities dissertation chapters, Citation Master successfully verified approximately 95–96% of all citations that are verifiable in principle — that is, citations to published, indexed sources. The remaining citations that fail tend to be genuinely difficult: manuscripts, obscure edited volumes, archival sources, very old publications, or works in languages with limited English-language API coverage.

The system makes mistakes. No AI-based system achieves perfect accuracy, and Citation Master is no exception. We encourage you to spot-check your results, particularly for high-stakes submissions like dissertation defenses or journal manuscripts. If you flag a result as incorrect, we use that feedback to improve the system.

Processing time depends on the length of your document and the number of citations it contains. A short essay with 15–20 citations typically processes in 3–5 minutes. A dissertation chapter with 60–80 citations may take 8–12 minutes. A full dissertation or thesis with 150–200 citations may take 15–20 minutes.

You do not need to stay on the page. Return to your dashboard at any time to check on your results.

You pay per verified citation. A verification is deducted only when a citation is successfully confirmed — failed citations cost nothing.

Verifications are purchased in advance in one of three packs: Essay ($10 / 50 verified citations), Chapter ($29 / 150 verified citations), or Thesis ($50 / 350 verified citations). Verifications do not expire and carry over across all your documents.

Yes. Citation Master is designed exactly for these use cases.

For academic integrity purposes: Citation Master verifies citations you have already written. It checks whether your sources are real and whether you have described them correctly. It does not write citations for you, invent sources, or modify your arguments. Using Citation Master is analogous to using a spellchecker or a library catalogue — it is a verification tool, not a content-generation tool.

If your institution or journal has specific policies about AI-assisted writing tools, Citation Master falls outside the scope of what those policies typically govern. However, if you have any doubt, check with your supervisor, editor, or institution directly.

Citation Master currently accepts .docx (Microsoft Word) files. For best results, use the Word document you drafted in — the native .docx format gives the most reliable footnote and endnote extraction.

Support for additional formats (LaTeX, Google Docs export, plain text) is planned for future releases.

Citation Master uses partial processing. When you upload a document, the system extracts and parses all your citations first. Verification then runs on as many citations as your balance covers.

If your balance runs short, the verified citations are returned to you immediately and the remainder are locked. Your footnotes stay in their original form until you unlock the rest — applying partial footnote edits would break your document’s structure. You can add more verifications at any point and unlock the remaining citations with one click. No re-upload, no re-extraction.

No. Citation Master is a formatting and verification tool — it does not write your arguments, find sources for you, or produce academic content on your behalf. It takes citations you have already included in your paper and checks whether they are accurate and correctly formatted.

Using Citation Master is no different from asking a librarian to confirm a source exists — you did the intellectual work, we confirm the reference is accurate.

Reference managers like Zotero store the citations you give them. Citation Master verifies that those citations are correct. They are complementary tools, not competing ones.

The intellectual work — reading the sources, forming the argument, writing the paper — is entirely your own. Citation Master handles the bibliography hygiene so that work is correctly attributed.