Citely

Overview

Citely is an AI-powered academic platform purpose-built for citation verification and source discovery. It addresses the growing challenge of fabricated, hallucinated, or inaccurate references in scholarly writing, especially in contexts where AI assistants produce plausible but nonexistent citations. By combining machine intelligence with comprehensive bibliographic metadata, Citely helps researchers, editors, and students ensure that every cited work is real, correctly attributed, and traceable.

The platform draws upon a large-scale index of more than 160 million papers, integrating with authoritative scholarly data sources such as CrossRef and OpenAlex. Its AI engine automates DOI verification, reference checking, and literature authenticity assessment. It identifies AI-generated fake citations—references that match no real publication—and flags incomplete or incorrect metadata. In addition to verification, Citely functions as a source finder: users can discover relevant, real papers to support their writing when a citation is missing or unverifiable. The service is engineered around standard scholarly identifiers and metadata APIs, enabling reliable matching across multiple linguistic contexts.

For academic workflows, Citely acts as a quality assurance layer between manuscript drafting and publication. Editors and peer reviewers can validate reference lists quickly, while authors can audit their bibliographies before submission. The tool is designed to streamline the citation-checking process, reducing manual lookup time and preventing the dissemination of false references. Its support of multiple languages—including English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Russian—makes it useful for international research teams and non-English academic writing.

As AI-generated text becomes more prevalent in research, Citely addresses a critical integrity gap. It strengthens trust in scholarly communication by ensuring that the literature underpinning new work is authentic, discoverable, and properly verified.

Core capabilities

AI-Powered Citation Verification

Automatically checks academic references against a database of 160M+ papers to confirm they exist and are correctly cited.

AI-Generated Fake Citation Detection

Identifies references that appear plausible but are not indexed in any scholarly database, catching citations hallucinated by AI assistants.

Source Finder

When a citation cannot be verified, locates real academic papers that can serve as genuine replacements or additional evidence.

DOI Verification

Validates Digital Object Identifier metadata to ensure each reference resolves to the correct publication and author details.

Comprehensive Database Access

Leverages CrossRef and OpenAlex APIs to cross-check bibliographic records across major scientific repositories.

Literature Authenticity Assessment

Evaluates whether references align with established publications, supporting research integrity and academic honesty.

Multilingual Interface

Available in nine languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Russian, enabling global adoption.

Reference Checking Workflow

Streamlines the verification process for citation lists, reducing manual lookup and improving bibliographic quality.

Use cases

Auditing reference lists in a manuscript before journal submission

Detecting fabricated citations introduced by AI writing assistants

Verifying DOIs and metadata during peer review

Finding genuine sources to replace unverifiable references

Checking the authenticity of citations in academic assignments

Maintaining literature quality in institutional research outputs

Supporting multilingual research teams with cross-language citation validation