VerusCite is built for one specific job: helping you confirm that the citations listed in your document correspond to real, findable sources. That scope is narrower than many people expect, so it helps to be explicit about what the tool does and does not do.
What VerusCite is
- Verifies whether a citation exists. We extract citations from your PDF and look them up against scholarly databases and web search. For each entry, we try to find a matching real-world source.
- Distinguishes hallucinations. When a citation cannot be matched, or when metadata clearly does not line up with what we find, we flag it so you can investigate. The goal is to catch references that look plausible but are not backed by an actual publication.
- Makes it easy to view and change verification status. Results are presented in an interactive table. You can review each citation, see our reasoning, and update the status yourself when you disagree or have additional context.
What VerusCite is not
- It does not check whether a citation is accurate in the paper. We do not read your prose and judge whether the cited work actually supports the claim you make in the text. A citation can exist, match a real paper, and still be used in a way that misrepresents the source. That kind of substantive accuracy review is outside our scope.
- It does not check whether the paper was cited inline at all. We do not verify that every in-text citation has a corresponding bibliography entry, or that every bibliography entry is cited in the body of the document. We work from the references we extract; we do not audit the full cite-versus-bibliography graph inside your manuscript.
In short: VerusCite is a citation existence and metadata checker, not a full literature review or argument validator. It is meant to save you time finding broken, missing, or hallucinated references before you submit, publish, or share your work.
If you are unsure whether a flagged citation is a real problem, use the status controls and notes in your results table to record what you found. When in doubt, verify the source yourself the way you normally would — VerusCite is there to narrow the search, not replace your judgment about how a source is used.