Frequently asked questions

CiteFirm is a citation verification platform for academic papers. You upload a paper as a PDF; CiteFirm extracts every in-text citation and bibliography entry, resolves each reference to a real published work, and — optionally, using AI — breaks each citing sentence into individual claims and finds the passage in the cited source that relates to each claim. You review the evidence and record the verdict, then export the result as a shareable verification record.

No. CiteFirm never writes or rewrites your text, never suggests citations to add, and never invents a source. It works only on the citations already in your paper: it gathers the evidence for each one and gives you the final say.

Yes, in two ways. First, every bibliography entry is resolved against scholarly metadata (DOIs, titles, authors) — a fabricated reference fails to match any real work and gets flagged. Second, even when a reference is real, CiteFirm checks the harder problem: whether the cited source actually supports the specific claim it's attached to, which is where subtler AI miscitations show up.

See the full guide: How to check whether an AI hallucinated a citation.

No — deliberately. CiteFirm shows you each claim side by side with the most relevant passage it found in the cited source, and flags potential issues. The verdict — Supported, Partial, or Unsupported — is always recorded by you. Verification results are a research aid, not a certification.

Papers and source documents are uploaded as PDFs. Verification records are exported and imported as .cfv files, CiteFirm's portable verification format.

A .cfv file is a CiteFirm verification record: a portable file containing a paper's citations, the individual claims each citing sentence makes, the passages found in each cited source, and the verdicts recorded by the reviewer. Anyone can open a .cfv file in CiteFirm — including on a free account — to see the evidence behind each citation for themselves.

A free account lets you upload papers, extract citations and references, upload source PDFs, annotate citations manually, and import, view, edit, and export .cfv verification files. The AI verification steps — claim decomposition and passage finding — require CiteFirm Pro. See pricing.

CiteFirm Pro is $10 per month and includes AI verification for up to 10 papers per rolling 7 days. It starts with a 30-day free trial, and you can cancel anytime from the billing portal — cancelling during the trial means you're never charged.

No. CiteFirm does not use your manuscripts, sources, or verification records to train AI models — its own or anyone else's. Text is sent to third-party AI providers only to perform the citation and passage analysis you requested, and uploaded files are stored as private account content.

You can create an account with email and password, or sign in with Google or ORCID.