Frequently asked questions

Citation Master works from footnotes or endnotes — specifically, footnotes created using your word processor’s built-in footnote tool (Insert → Footnote in Microsoft Word). The system reads each footnote, identifies the source it refers to, and verifies it.

Two requirements: First, your document must contain footnotes or endnotes with citations. A document with only in-text citations (author-date style) or a standalone bibliography cannot be processed. Second, we do not process a bibliography alone — the footnotes are the input.

If your document already has a bibliography, Citation Master will detect it and use the entries as additional context to improve matching accuracy. But the bibliography alone is not sufficient — footnotes are required.

Citation Master takes an academic document you’ve already written — an essay, thesis chapter, dissertation, or research paper — and verifies every citation in it against global academic databases. It extracts your footnotes or endnotes, identifies what each source is supposed to be, searches for that source across Crossref, OpenAlex, Google Books, and the open web, and tells you which citations it could confirm and which it could not. For every verified citation, it also reformats the entry according to your chosen citation style. You get back revised in-text footnotes and a clean, formatted bibliography.

It does one thing, and it does it carefully: it tells you whether your sources check out.

Citation Master currently accepts .docx (Microsoft Word) files only. For best results, use the Word document you drafted in — the native .docx format gives the most reliable footnote and endnote extraction.

PDF support is planned for a future release. Support for additional formats (LaTeX, Google Docs export, plain text) is also planned.

Processing time depends on the length of your document and the number of citations it contains. A short essay with 15–20 citations typically processes in 3–5 minutes. A dissertation chapter with 60–80 citations may take 8–12 minutes. A full dissertation or thesis with 150–200 citations may take 15–20 minutes.

You do not need to stay on the page. Return to your dashboard at any time to check on your results.

A citation is marked verified when Citation Master has found independent evidence that the source exists as described. This means locating a record in at least one authoritative database or on the web that matches the key metadata fields in your citation: the author’s name, the title of the work, the year of publication, the journal or publisher, and (where applicable) a DOI or stable identifier.

Verification is not a simple keyword match. The system compares structured metadata field by field and evaluates evidence from multiple sources before making a decision. A citation is only marked verified when the evidence crosses a confidence threshold.

What verification does not mean: we are not checking whether the passage you cited accurately represents what the source says. We verify that the source exists and that your citation describes it correctly. Interpretive accuracy is outside the scope of what Citation Master does.

Citations that fail verification are flagged in your results. You will see them clearly marked in the output alongside the citations that passed. You are not charged for failed verifications.

Failure does not necessarily mean your citation is wrong. Common reasons for failure include: the source is a manuscript, archival document, or local publication not indexed in any database; the source is very old and pre-dates digital cataloguing; the publication is in a language or region underrepresented in global academic APIs; or the citation contains a significant error that prevented a match.

When a citation fails, Citation Master notes the reason to the extent it can determine one. It is then your responsibility to verify that citation by hand.

In internal testing on humanities dissertation chapters, Citation Master successfully verified approximately 95–96% of all citations that are verifiable in principle — that is, citations to published, indexed sources. The remaining citations that fail tend to be genuinely difficult: manuscripts, obscure edited volumes, archival sources, very old publications, or works in languages with limited English-language API coverage.

The system makes mistakes. No AI-based system achieves perfect accuracy, and Citation Master is no exception. We encourage you to spot-check your results, particularly for high-stakes submissions like dissertation defenses or journal manuscripts. If you flag a result as incorrect, we use that feedback to improve the system.

Citation Master searches four sources for each citation:

Crossref — the primary registry for scholarly DOIs. Covers most peer-reviewed journal articles and many books and book chapters published since the late 1990s.

OpenAlex — an open index of scholarly works maintained by OurResearch. Covers journal articles, books, dissertations, and preprints with particularly strong coverage of open-access publications.

Google Books — metadata for a very large number of published books, including older works not covered well by Crossref or OpenAlex.

Web search — for sources not found in any of the above, Citation Master performs a targeted web search, fetches relevant pages, and extracts evidence directly from the text of those pages.

These four sources are searched in sequence. A citation only reaches the web search stage if the structured databases fail to return a match.

You pay per verified citation. A verification is deducted only when a citation is successfully confirmed — failed citations cost nothing.

Verifications are purchased in advance. Current packs:

• Essay — $10.00 / 50 verified citations
• Chapter — $29.00 / 150 verified citations — Most Popular
• Thesis — $50.00 / 350 verified citations

For departments or research centers needing bulk access, contact us at support@citation-master.ai.

You can purchase verifications at any time from your account dashboard. Verifications do not expire.

At signup, your account receives a one-time welcome balance of 50 free verification credits (one per individual). A credit is deducted only when a citation is successfully verified.

These credits are account-wide and can be used across one or multiple documents. If your balance runs out during processing, remaining verified citations are shown as locked until you top up and unlock them.

Citation Master uses partial processing. When you upload a document, the system extracts and parses all your citations first. Verification then runs on as many citations as your balance covers.

If your balance runs short, the verified citations are returned to you immediately and the remainder are locked. Your footnotes stay in their original form until you unlock the rest — individual footnotes often combine multiple sources, so applying partial revisions would break your document’s structure. You can add more verifications at any point and unlock the remaining citations with one click. No re-upload, no re-extraction.

When you flag a result, it is recorded and reviewed by our team. Flagged citations help us identify systematic errors in the verification logic — for example, if a particular type of source is being consistently misidentified or if a database is returning bad metadata.

We cannot manually re-verify individual citations on demand in the current version, but your flag improves the system for you and for other users. Refunds and credits are handled according to our Terms of Service, including the refund policy in Section 4.

Citation Master currently supports Chicago (Notes-Bibliography), MLA 9th edition, APA 7th edition, Harvard, and IEEE. Additional styles are planned.

If you upload a document formatted in a style other than these, Citation Master can still extract and verify your citations — it will just reformat them into whichever of the supported styles you select at the time of upload. See also the question on reformatting an existing bibliography.

Yes. Citation Master can reformat your bibliography as part of the verification process, and you choose your target output style at upload.

If your document already includes a bibliography, we use it as additional context while verifying the footnote references, then output citations in the style you selected.

However, reformatting only applies to citations that pass verification. Citations that fail verification are returned in their original form, since the system cannot confidently restructure metadata it could not confirm.

If your goal is purely reformatting — not verification — Citation Master is a more expensive and slower option than a dedicated bibliography manager like Zotero or Mendeley. It is best used when you want both verification and reformatting.

Yes. Citation Master is designed exactly for these use cases.

For academic integrity purposes: Citation Master verifies citations you have already written. It checks whether your sources are real and whether you have described them correctly. It does not write citations for you, invent sources, or modify your arguments. Using Citation Master is no different from asking a librarian to confirm a source exists — you did the intellectual work, we confirm the reference is accurate.

If your institution or journal has specific policies about AI-assisted writing tools, Citation Master falls outside the scope of what those policies typically govern. It is not a writing assistant. However, if you have any doubt, check with your supervisor, editor, or institution directly.

No. Citation Master is a formatting and verification tool — it does not write your arguments, find sources for you, or produce academic content on your behalf. It takes citations you have already included in your paper and checks whether they are accurate and correctly formatted.

Reference managers like Zotero store the citations you give them. Citation Master verifies that those citations are correct. They are complementary tools, not competing ones.

The intellectual work — reading the sources, forming the argument, writing the paper — is entirely your own. Citation Master handles the bibliography hygiene so that work is correctly attributed.

Yes, and we have heard from instructors who encourage students to run their bibliographies through Citation Master before submission. It tends to surface systematic citation habits — incomplete metadata, inconsistent formatting, reliance on secondary sources — in a way that is actionable.

If you are interested in discussing a departmental or course-level arrangement, please contact us. We can discuss verification arrangements for student cohorts.

Your document is uploaded to process your citations. We do not use your document to train AI models, and we do not share your content with third parties outside the services required to process it (the AI inference providers we use to parse and judge citations).

Documents are deleted from our servers after processing is complete. We retain only the structured citation metadata and verification results so that you can download your output.

If your document contains sensitive research data or unpublished findings and you have concerns about uploading it, we recommend using a version of the document with placeholder content in the body text, keeping only the footnotes and bibliography intact. Citation Master works from your footnotes — the body text is largely incidental to the verification process.

Not yet. Institutional pricing is on our roadmap. If you are a department coordinator, library, or research center interested in bulk access, please contact us and we will add you to the list for early access to institutional plans.

Citation Master is currently in a closed Beta and we are prioritizing institutional and academic domain emails during this phase.

If you do not have an academic domain email, you can still join the waitlist. Non-academic users will be granted access as soon as we open to the general public.

Email us at support@citation-master.ai. We aim to respond within one business day.

For general questions, this FAQ is the best starting point. For billing issues, include your account email in your message so we can find your account quickly.