I built a tool to check if AI-generated citations actually exist

Ken O. — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:35:58 +0000

I’ve been working on CiteTrue, a tool that checks whether academic citations actually exist.

AI is becoming a normal part of research and writing, but there’s still one problem I kept noticing: it can generate references that look completely legitimate but are either wrong or entirely made up.

The author looks real.
The journal sounds real.
The title sounds like an actual paper.

But when you try to find the source... it doesn’t exist.

So I built CiteTrue.

You paste your reference list and CiteTrue checks the citations against real academic databases. It can catch references that can’t be found as well as problems like incorrect publication details.

The goal is to make it much easier to verify AI-generated references instead of manually searching for every citation.

You can try the Citation Checker here:

https://citetrue.com/citation-checker

DEV Community: Ken O.

I built a tool to check if AI-generated citations actually exist