About

pubcheck checks citations against public publication indexes.

pubcheck reads a manuscript, grant, bibliography, or critique, extracts the citations it can recognize, and checks them against public publication indexes.

A Lancet audit in May 2026 reviewed roughly 2.5 million biomedical papers and found that 1 in 277 papers in the first weeks of 2026 cited something that did not exist. Two years earlier the rate was 1 in 2,828.

Topaz et al., Lancet, May 2026

Result Labels

matches record: The citation points to a record that matches the cited details.
retracted: The cited record is retracted or withdrawn. Check the notice before relying on it.
details differ: The citation points to a record, but the cited details differ. Check the reference before editing the document.
bad identifier: The identifier is malformed or not valid for its source. Fix it and run the check again.
no record: No matching record was found in the public indexes. Search manually before treating the citation as fabricated.
no identifier: The citation did not include enough information to check. Add an identifier and run the check again.
lookup error: A lookup service did not respond. Use Retry lookup errors in the app to run only affected citations again.

Review Flags

For details that differ, compare the citation and returned record before editing the source document.
For no record, search manually in PubMed, Google Scholar, or the journal site before treating the citation as fabricated.
Use the flagged filter and the n / p shortcuts to move through the review set.
Copy the summary or export JSON, BibTeX, RIS, CSV, or PDF when you need a record of the check.

Limits

Title fallback is fuzzy. Short or generic titles can match the wrong record.
Indexing can lag. Fresh papers may not be in every resolver yet.
Some work is out of scope. Books, theses, internal reports, and grey literature may not appear in public indexes.
Publication records can be messy. Author ordering, accent stripping, and journal title casing can mark a real citation as details differ.
In-text checks cover numeric styles only. Bracketed [1], parenthetical (1,2), and superscript markers are checked against the reference list. Author-year citations are detected but not checked; the report says so.

What It Is Not

pubcheck does not read the paper, judge whether the citation supports the sentence around it, or decide whether the science is right. It tells you which references need a second look.

For confidential manuscripts, grants, reviews, or unpublished figures, run pubcheck serve on your machine.