My Coworker Was Using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to Check Hundreds of References, So I Built This

milo4210 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:28:08 +0000

A coworker asked me to build a small tool for checking academic references.

Part of his job is reviewing references and making sure the papers actually exist and the information is correct.

His workflow was basically:

Ctrl+C → search → open the paper → check DOI, authors, title, journal, year → record the result

Then repeat it for the next reference.

And sometimes there are hundreds of references to check.

So he asked me if I could automate some of it.

I built a very simple internal tool first.

He shared it with a few coworkers, and that's where things got interesting. They started finding cases that the first version couldn't handle:

DOI doesn't match the paper
title or author information is different
wrong journal or publication year
incomplete metadata
the paper can't be found at all

So I kept adding checks and fixing edge cases.

Eventually, that little internal tool became CiteWise.

The idea behind CiteWise is pretty simple: instead of just formatting a citation, it checks whether the reference itself looks correct.

You can use it to verify DOI and bibliographic information, find mismatches, and check references in batches.

CiteWise: [https://cietwise.dev]

I'm putting it out there now and would like to see how other people handle this problem.

If you've ever had to manually check a large bibliography, what does your workflow look like?

DEV Community: milo4210

My Coworker Was Using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to Check Hundreds of References, So I Built This