Your AI Hallucinated a Citation
Why I built CiteStamp — a free, in-browser citation checker for the AI era
Somewhere in your bibliography there may be a paper that was never written.
It looks perfect. Real-sounding authors — maybe authors who actually exist, who actually work in that field. A plausible title. A journal you've read. A DOI with the right shape, the right prefix, the confident string of digits. Every formatting convention honored. It is, in every visible respect, a citation.
It just doesn't point at anything. Paste the DOI into your browser and you land nowhere. Search the title and you find echoes, near-misses, nothing. The paper is a ghost, a statistically probable citation, which is exactly what a language model is built to produce and exactly what a bibliography must never contain.
If you write with an LLM anywhere in the loop: drafting, summarizing, "just cleaning up the related work section”, you have probably shipped one of these, or come close. This isn't a hypothetical failure mode anymore. ArXiv now bans authors for a year when submissions contain unambiguous AI-generated errors, hallucinated references named explicitly. Recent sweeps of major ML venues keep finding invented citations in accepted papers — work that made it through review with a ghost in the references. The reviewers who catch them do it the artisanal way: paste the DOI, squint at Google Scholar, repeat.
That moment — a reviewer discovering your ghost before you did — is the cheapest professional embarrassment there is to prevent. So I built the thing that prevents it.
citestamp.com — free, in the browser, no account.
Who builds a citation checker?
I'm an independent researcher. No academic support, no lab, no library subscription that unlocks the grown-up citation indexes. I came to research sideways: years in healthcare, then teaching myself to write software, then discovering that the questions I cared about: information theory, complexity, how systems integrate, didn't require anyone's permission to work on. Just time, secondhand hardware, and an unreasonable tolerance for doing things the long way.
Being unaffiliated teaches you something about scholarly infrastructure most academics never see: nearly all of it assumes you have an institution behind you. The citation databases that could tell you whether a reference is real sit behind subscriptions priced for universities. The tools that watch for retractions charge monthly. Even seeing your own paper's place in the citation network can cost more per year than I spent on the computer I'm typing this on.
Meanwhile the actual public record (Crossref, DataCite, OpenAlex) is right there. Open. Queryable. Free. The raw material for checking whether a citation resolves to a real work has been public infrastructure for years. What was missing was a tool that used it honestly and gave the result away.
So: CiteStamp. It launched this week. Here's what it does and, just as important, what it refuses to do.
Three checks, in your browser, nothing uploaded
Paste a bibliography — BibTeX, a LaTeX thebibliography block, or a plain reference list — into citestamp.com/check, and every reference is checked three ways:
Does it resolve? Each reference is looked up against Crossref, DataCite, and OpenAlex — the public registries of record. A reference that resolves to nothing in any of them has the signature shape of an AI-invented citation. That's the ghost detector.
Does it agree with its own DOI? The subtler failure: a real DOI attached to the wrong paper. The DOI resolves fine — to something other than what your citation claims. A human skimming the bibliography will never catch this. A registry lookup catches it instantly.
Has the publisher marked it retracted? Retraction, withdrawal, expression of concern — publisher events, stated as publisher events. The famous demonstration: run a real published pediatrics paper from 2007 with 277 references through CiteStamp, and it flags exactly one — Wakefield 1998, marked retracted by The Lancet. A citation that was clean when you drafted your introduction can rot before your defense. CiteStamp also keeps a free watchlist that re-checks your papers daily for new publisher notices, so you hear about it before someone else tells you.
A real 2007 paper's reference-health page: 277 references, one flag — Wakefield 1998, marked retracted by the publisher.
That page in the screenshot is itself a feature nobody else ships: any published work can carry a living CiteStamped badge. A dated, embeddable summary of whether its references resolve and none has been retracted, re-checked daily. Not a one-time seal; a pulse. Put it in a README, a CV, a journal page.
And here is the architectural decision I care most about: your manuscript never leaves your browser. The parsing happens client-side. The only thing that goes over the network is a public identifier — a DOI, a title query — sent straight from your browser to the public registries. No account. No upload. No server holding a copy of your unpublished draft. You don't have to take my word for it: open your network tab and watch. Almost every other tool in this space wants your document on their server. Some retain it. One prominent one has no privacy policy at all. I think asking researchers to upload unpublished manuscripts to a stranger's server to check for trust problems is a joke that writes itself.
The same engine lives wherever you write: a Chrome extension (Manifest V3, no remote code), a Zotero plugin, a Word add-in, and continuous checking as you type in Overleaf.
And if you sit on the other side of the desk (à la reviewing manuscripts, editing a journal) the same check runs in reverse: paste a submission's reference list and screen the whole thing in about ten seconds, in your browser, nothing stored. The ghost hunt reviewers currently do one DOI at a time becomes a paste.
What CiteStamp will never tell you
CiteStamp will never call a paper "true." It will never call one "fake." You won't find the words verified or fact-checked anywhere in the product, and that's not timidity — it's the entire design philosophy.
Tools in this category increasingly sell verdicts: AI-powered confidence scores, "95% accuracy," a green checkmark that means... something. A confidence score is a black box wearing a lab coat. CiteStamp's checks are deterministic: a reference either resolves in the public registries or it doesn't; it either matches its DOI or it doesn't; the publisher either posted a retraction notice or didn't. Every result is a receipt you can independently re-derive, not a judgment you're asked to trust.
That's what the name means. "CiteStamped" is a state, not a verdict: every reference in your bibliography has been checked against the record and holds up, and it stays that way because the watchlist keeps checking. It doesn't mean your paper is right. It means your citations are real, consistent, and standing; which is the part a machine can honestly attest to.
The open graph — and the part where I sign my name
Checking references is defense. The other half of CiteStamp is offense: an open citation graph you can see, query, and write on.
Drop any DOI into citestamp.com/graph and watch that paper's citation neighborhood assemble itself — a live force-directed map of what cites it, what it cites, what connects to what. The whole inferred graph, roughly fourteen million edges, is CC0. Public domain. No login, no institution, no meter. The commercial citation indexes charge universities five figures for a view like this and lock independent researchers out entirely. Literature-mapping tools charge monthly subscriptions to draw pictures over open data, and none of them can tell you whether a citation is real, resolving, or retracted while they do it. Ours draws the picture and runs the checks, free, because it's built on the same public record it shows you.
And the record is built to outlive its operator: the signed log is append-only, mirrored publicly, and independently replayable. If CiteStamp vanished tomorrow, the graph wouldn't.
My own paper's neighborhood — signed claims in gold, machine-inferred edges in steel.
And you can walk it. Click any node and that paper's own neighborhood fans out — then another, then another, until you're three hops deep in a corner of the literature you didn't know existed, watching the map grow as you go. It's discovery by relationship instead of keyword roulette: not "what papers contain these words" but what cites this, what it built on — and, as signed claims accumulate, what supports it and what refutes it. It's genuinely hypnotic. I built the thing and I still lose time wandering it.
The graph has two strictly separated layers. Machine-inferred edges, mined from the open registries, render in steel. Signed claims render in gold: a human put their ORCID on a typed assertion that one paper cites, supports, refutes, or extends another, onto a public, append-only, CC0 log. That's post-publication peer review with a spine — not a comment thread, not karma, but attributable claims on the permanent record.
One rule is enforced everywhere and it's non-negotiable: papers, not people. You can sign that a result fails to replicate. You cannot touch the person who published it. Every claim targets a work. The record accumulates argument, never pile-ons.
You can also claim your own papers, sign your ORCID onto your own work, and put your stamp on it. No institution's permission, no waiting to be indexed by someone's proprietary database. For unaffiliated researchers, this is the part I built most selfishly: you put yourself on the map.
For the AI on your side of the desk
The same failure mode runs in reverse: if you're building with LLMs, agents, RAG pipelines, research assistants — your system is one plausible-sounding paragraph away from citing a ghost too. CiteStamp exposes its graph and its checks through an API and an MCP server, so your agent can check whether a citation resolves before it writes it. The MCP endpoint is keyless, point a client at mcp.citestamp.com/mcp and go; no signup, no token, rate-limited but open. The antidote to AI slop turns out to be something AI can use.
For the people who run the pipes
One more audience I built this for: the small end of publishing. Preprint servers, independent journals, and small presses can screen every submission's reference list through the same public API; the big publishers run integrity pipelines built for the big publishers, but this one is open to everyone. If you run a venue and want invented references caught at the submission gate instead of in public, the pipe is already there and the price of entry is zero.
The honest economics
Everything I've described above is free, without caps: the checker, the watchlist, the graph, claiming and signing with your ORCID. Not free-as-teaser. Free because a citation check that only well-funded labs can afford doesn't fix the problem. The ghosts don't discriminate by institution.
There is one paid thing. Pro costs $35 a year and detects nothing that free doesn't. It automates: continuous checking as you type in Overleaf instead of pasting, auto-enrolling everything you cite by DOI onto the retraction watchlist instead of adding papers by hand. If you'd rather paste and click, the free tier is the entire detection engine, forever. (For comparison, tools in this space run $72 to $240 a year, for less checking and more uploading.)
And the numbers, since I promised disclosure: CiteStamp launched this week with zero users and zero paying customers. It's built solo, it runs lean on Cloudflare's secure edge, and it doesn't need to hit a growth target to keep existing. I'm not selling you traction. I'm showing you architecture and asking you to try it.
Try to break it
Here's the ask, and it's small:
Paste a bibliography into citestamp.com/check — especially one an LLM helped write. See what comes back.
Drop your DOI into the graph and look at your paper's universe. If you post the screenshot, tag it, I want to see it.
Tell me what breaks. It's week one and it's one person; there will be rough edges, and I'd rather hear about them than not. I'm at info@citestamp.com.
The second signature could be yours. Get your paper CiteStamped before your reviewer does it for you.
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