Citely

Citely is an academic research tool. Citely checks pasted references against scholarly databases such as CrossRef, PubMed, arXiv and OpenAlex, flagging fake or mismatched citations, and finds real sources for a claim, with credit-based paid plans.

Citely is a web-based citation verification and source discovery tool aimed at people who write with references: students, academics, librarians and journal editors. Its core job is to catch citations that do not correspond to a real publication, a problem that has grown as chat assistants produce plausible but invented references. The tool has two main workflows. The Source Finder takes a claim or short passage and returns real academic sources with verified metadata, which can be exported in formats such as APA and MLA. The Citation Checker takes a pasted reference list or block of text and compares each entry against scholarly records, flagging entries that are fabricated, mismatched or impossible to confirm. The homepage names CrossRef, PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar as sources, and the site's own metadata cites more than 160 million records. Separate landing pages cover narrower cases, including checking references produced by ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, spotting fabricated DOIs and mixed-up author and title combinations, and a written guide to confirming a citation by DOI, title, author, year and venue. In practice, a user pastes text, runs a check and reviews which entries matched. Usage is metered in credits tied to character counts rather than reference counts: the source search accepts up to 300 characters per request, while reference verification accepts 2,000 to 4,000 characters depending on the plan. Paid plans add deeper source verification and export to APA, MLA and Chicago. Among alternatives, Citely sits closer to a fact-checker for bibliographies than to a full reference manager or a general research assistant. It does not replace tools that store libraries and format manuscripts, but it addresses a narrower gap: confirming that what is cited actually exists. The same company also lists sister products, including an autonomous literature-review agent and an editable scientific figure maker, which suggests a broader research suite around the checker.