A free self-audit · Yours either way
Free automated checkers can tell you a reference exists. This is the layer they cannot reach: whether the cited paper supports the sentence it is attached to. Pick one citation from your own manuscript, the most load-bearing one, and answer six questions about it honestly. Then run your next two.
Nothing is collected. The audit runs on your screen and stays there.
Does the reference resolve at a registry?
Paste the DOI into doi.org, or the PubMed ID into PubMed. It should load, and it should be the paper you meant to cite.
Does every field match the record?
Title, authors, journal, year, pages: your entry against the registry's, field by field. The most common defect is a real paper with a wrong identifier.
Have you read the source recently?
The abstract at minimum, this month, not from memory. A citation from memory is a citation from an earlier version of you.
Does the source cover the same scope?
Same population, same outcome, same conditions as your sentence. A study of something adjacent is adjacent evidence, not support.
Is your verb no stronger than the source's?
If the source "suggests" and your sentence "demonstrates," the citation exists but the support does not.
Does the finding point the same way?
Direction matters. A source reporting no effect, or the opposite effect, cannot carry your sentence.
The verdict, in the same register we use on ourselves
Answer all six and the verdict writes itself. 0 of 6 answered so far. No partial credit: a citation either supports its sentence or it does not yet.
This is one citation, self-checked. A review runs the same questions across every citation in the manuscript, verifies each at the registries, runs an independent check on every finding, and a person reads the complete record before it is released. If that is the depth you want, request a review. If not, the full free checklist covers the rest of the pass.