Product

How CiteFirm works

CiteFirm is a citation verification platform for academic papers. It traces every citation from the claim it supports in your manuscript to the exact passage in the cited source — and leaves the verdict to you.

Last updated July 29, 2026

  1. 1

    Upload your paper

    Upload a manuscript as a PDF. CiteFirm reads the full text — including numbered, author–year, and footnote citation styles — and works on a private copy in your account.

  2. 2

    Extract the bibliography and every in-text citation

    CiteFirm pulls out the reference list and finds every in-text citation marker in the body of the paper, then links each marker to its bibliography entry. You can review and correct the extracted record at any point.

  3. 3

    Resolve each reference to a real work

    Every bibliography entry is checked against scholarly metadata (DOIs, titles, authors, venues). A reference that can't be matched to any real work is flagged — which is exactly how fabricated or garbled references surface.

  4. 4

    Attach the source documents

    Where an open-access PDF of a cited work is available, CiteFirm retrieves it. For everything else, you can upload source PDFs you have access to.

  5. 5

    Decompose each citing sentence into claims

    A sentence like “X increases Y and is more prevalent in Z [12, 14]” actually makes several distinct factual claims. CiteFirm's AI splits each citing sentence into its individual claims and attributes each claim to the citation it leans on, so nothing gets verified in vague bulk.

  6. 6

    Find the supporting passage in each source

    For every claim, CiteFirm searches the cited source and surfaces the most relevant passages, shown side by side with the claim — with the exact location in the source document.

  7. 7

    You make the call

    You read the claim next to the passage and record whether the source supports it. CiteFirm never declares a citation “true” — it gathers the evidence and gives you the final say.

  8. 8

    Export a shareable verification record

    The finished review exports as a CiteFirm verification file (.cfv) — a portable record of every citation, claim, passage, and verdict that anyone can open to see the evidence for themselves.

What CiteFirm deliberately doesn't do

Generative AI hands you an answer and asks you to trust it. CiteFirm does the opposite, and a few boundaries are built in on purpose:

  • It never writes your paper. CiteFirm doesn't generate prose, rewrite sentences, or suggest citations to add.
  • It never invents a source. Every passage it shows you is quoted from a real document in your project, with its location in that document.
  • It never declares a citation “true.” The tool surfaces evidence and flags potential issues; the Supported / Partial / Unsupported verdict is always recorded by a human.
  • It doesn't train AI on your work. Your manuscripts and sources are processed only to run the analysis you asked for — never used to train models (see our Terms).

Who uses it

Researchers checking their own manuscripts before submission, graduate students auditing a literature review, editors and peer reviewers spot-checking a submission's references, and instructors verifying that a paper's citations — human- or AI-assisted — actually hold up. If you're specifically worried about fabricated references, see our guide to checking whether an AI hallucinated a citation.

What it costs

Extraction, manual review, and .cfv import/export are free. The AI steps — claim decomposition and passage finding — are part of CiteFirm Pro at $10/month, with a 30-day free trial. Details on the pricing page.

See it on your own paper

Upload a PDF and CiteFirm will extract its citations in minutes. No AI runs until you ask for them.

Create free account