The Next Generation Academic Reference Tool
Academic references, done right.
RefRunner checks your citations against public databases — finding missing DOIs, fixing errors, and exporting a polished bibliography in any citation style.
What do you want to do?
Validate references
Look up every reference. Add DOIs. Flag retractions. Match in-text citations.
Find a particular reference
An author and a year, a few title words, or a DOI is all you need to find and format perfectly.
Build a reference list
Search the research literature, see abstracts, and start work on a topic new to you.
Systematic literature review
Search keywords in a set of journals, build a list, bulk download PDFs.
No account needed. No AI. Every verdict is a database lookup you can click.
- Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., et al. (2021). Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature, 596(7873), 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2✓VerifiedConfirmed against Crossref — all details correct
- He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2015). Deep residual learning for image recognition. arXiv preprint.
- Marlow, T. (2021). Neural embeddings for bibliographic verification. Journal of Citation Science, 12(3), 45–67.
No account needed to try it — check our sample or upload your own paper, free and right in your browser.
A free account adds 50 lookups a day, saved reference lists, and free months when you refer colleagues.
📱 On a phone? Create a free account now and your reference lists will be waiting when start working on your paper.
The Next Generation Reference Tool
Citation and reference matcher
Your paper is all you need.
No database. No extensions. RefRunner works like you do. Drag and drop your manuscript. See instantly that every in-text citation and reference match. Missing references are quickly found by inserting your author-year citations as a starting place for the search.
Source Verification
References validated automatically.
No AI. No hallucinations. Every reference is searched at Crossref, OpenAlex, Open Library, and Google Books. Preprints automatically get the volume, page numbers, and publication year when available. See where the data comes from. Click the DOI to see for yourself.
Accurate citation styles
Any style. Instantly.
Choose from APA, MLA, Chicago, or any of thousands of custom styles. The publisher wants some variation of APA with a twist? No problem. We use the same formatter as Zotero, the gold standard for citation formatting, so you know your bibliography will be perfect.
Live search
Search. Click. Move on.
Type an author name and a word or two from the title — matching academic papers appear instantly. Press Enter or click to add any result directly to your reference list.
Research explorer
Explore connections.
Click an author to see their publications and affiliations and graphs of citations. Click any reference to explore works that cite it or are cited by it. Click any of those to add them to your list. One-click PDF links for Open Access papers and many publishers.
How it works
Drag & Drop
Drop in your manuscript, with your references in any state. Got just in-text citations and no references? No problem. Live search will find them.
Verify & Correct
Every citation is cross-checked against public databases. Missing DOIs are found, wrong ones flagged, details filled in.
Update
Copy to paste yourself. Export just the bibliography with notes about updated citations. Download your document with updated references.
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