Reference Checker

It reads your paper and compares two things that have to agree: the citations in your text and the list at the end. Then it reports the three mismatch problems:

• Orphan citations: cited in the text but missing from the reference list.
• Unused references: in the reference list but never cited in the text.
• Duplicate references: the same source listed more than once.

Your document is shown with every citation highlighted, next to a list you can filter, so you can see exactly where each problem is and jump straight to it.

The two lists drift apart easily while you edit: you delete a paragraph and leave its reference behind, swap one source for another and forget the old entry, or paste a citation and never add it to the list. Mismatches look careless to reviewers, examiners, and editors, and journals often return papers before review when citations and references do not line up. The rule is simple: every citation in your text needs exactly one matching entry in your reference list, and every entry in the list needs to be cited at least once. A quick check before submission catches all of it.

An orphan citation is a source you cite in the text but never list in your references, for example (Nakamura, 2021) with no Nakamura entry at the end of the document. It usually happens when a reference gets deleted or retitled after the citation was written. Orphan citations matter because the reader cannot find the source, and style guides such as APA require every cited work to appear in the reference list. The checker lists every orphan with the sentence it appears in, so you can either add the missing entry or remove the citation.

An unused reference is the opposite problem: an entry in your reference list that is never cited in the text. This typically happens when you cut a section while editing, or replace one source with a better one and forget to remove the old entry. APA and most other styles only want works you actually cited, so unused entries should be removed from the list. The checker flags every one of them so you can delete it or find a place to cite it.

Yes. If the same source appears twice in your list, for example two slightly different entries for the same author and year, or the same number used twice in a numbered list, the checker groups them and shows both versions side by side so you can keep one and delete the other.

It works with the three common families of citation:

• Author-date: APA, Harvard, and Chicago author-date, both in parentheses like (Smith, 2020) and in the sentence like Smith (2020), including citations that use et al.
• Numbered in brackets: Vancouver and IEEE, including ranges like [2-5] and lists like [1, 3, 7].
• Superscript numbers: AMA and Nature, which put small numbers after words.

The matching works the same way for all of them: it only needs the author names and year, or the number, to line up between the text and the list.

Word documents (.docx). If your paper is in Google Docs, use File, then Download, then Microsoft Word (.docx). If it is in Apple Pages, use the export to Word option. PDFs are not supported, because the checker needs to read the structure of the document, so export or save your file as .docx first.

Yes, this reference checker is completely free. There is no sign-up, no account, no credit card, and no limit on how many documents you can check. It works as a free citation checker for students, researchers, and anyone writing a paper who needs to be sure that in-text citations and the reference list match. Upload your .docx, read the report in seconds, and check as many documents as you like.

No. The whole check runs in your browser. Your file is opened locally with JavaScript and is never sent to a server, so nothing is stored and your unpublished work stays on your device. Close the tab and it is gone.

No, and it is worth knowing the difference. The checker makes sure that every citation and every reference match each other. It does not check whether each entry follows APA formatting exactly (italics, capitalization, DOI style), and it does not look up databases to confirm that a year, title, or DOI is correct. It also does not write or edit your references. Use it to catch mismatch problems, then do your usual style pass on the entries themselves.

Work through the flagged list:

1. Orphan citations: click each one to jump to the sentence in your document, then either add the missing entry to your reference list or delete the citation.
2. Unused references: cite them somewhere appropriate, or remove them from the list.
3. Duplicates: keep one version and delete the rest.
4. Save the document and upload it again to confirm everything is clean.

The checker does not edit your file; you make the changes in Word, and re-checking only takes a few seconds.

It looks for a section heading named References, Works Cited, Bibliography, Cited Works, or Literature Cited. A heading created with Word heading styles is detected first, and a short standalone paragraph with that title works too. Everything after the heading is treated as your list. If the checker reports that no reference list was found, make sure the title sits on its own line with nothing else in the paragraph, and that your entries follow it.

The most common reason is a slightly unusual citation format. Citations with page numbers inside the parentheses, such as (Smith, 2020, p. 4), are not picked up yet, so check those by hand. Superscript citations are detected with moderate confidence. If the checker reports that no reference list was found, the section heading is missing or named unusually, so it cannot tell where your list starts.