Drop in a Word, PDF, text or markdown file and RefRunner checks every reference against Crossref, OpenAlex and other databases.
To check the references in a paper, open it in RefRunner. Word, PDF, plain text and markdown files all work. Drop the file on the page, or click to browse. RefRunner identifies the references in your browser, without uploading your paper to our servers. DOIs are verified against Crossref. When there's no DOI, RefRunner searches for metadata at Crossref, OpenAlex, and several other databases. At the top is a summary: see at a glance how many changes were made or recommended. Here RefRunner added DOIs, updated a year, and found one reference that it was unable to verify.
Given a full paper, RefRunner also matches in-text citations against the reference list. Here we see that (Smith, 2019), is cited in the text, but it's not in the references. Click the red citation to search for it. Often, just one click adds it to your reference list. The references include "Zimmerman, 2002," but it's never cited.
Each reference gets a card comparing what's in your paper with a version formatted from the published metadata. Differences are highlighted, whether it's a real error, like a wrong author, year, or title, or just formatting, like punctuation or italics. Here we added the DOI and updated the year. The paper says 2004, but the publisher's record shows 2005. You can click the DOI to open a new tab and see for yourself that it's right. You are in control. Choose the corrected version, built from the metadata in your selected style, or keep your own. The metadata are wrong more than we'd like to think!
Or, if the generated reference isn't quite right, you can edit it right on the card. RefRunner can't find this one. It can't know if it's fake, from a small or private journal that's not indexed, or some other problem caused the search to fail. RefRunner offers some tools to help you out. RefRunner provides search links so you can check sites it can't access. The "search myself" button lets you tweak the search using RefRunner's searches. You can also indicate that it's fine the way it is.
At the bottom is the corrected list, in APA or any of more than ten thousand styles. When you're done, you can download your Word file with just the references, or the original file with the reference section replaced. Also available are versions for your reference manager, and the option to post the references and their abstracts on our forum for you to share with students or collaborators. That's it. Drop in your paper, and in under a minute see what needs fixing before anyone else does.