About RefRunner

RefRunner is an automated academic reference and citation validator that verifies your citations against Crossref, OpenAlex, and other public databases — finding missing DOIs, correcting wrong publication years, and exporting perfectly formatted reference lists in APA, MLA, Chicago, or any CSL style. No AI. Runs entirely in your browser.

Who built it

RefRunner is built and maintained by Jay Pfaffman and Literate Computing, a small company historically focused on helping people build commmunities with Discourse.

Jay's background

Jay earnned a BS in Computer Science, spent years teaching computer science in high schools, and then earned a PhD in Education at Vanderbilt University and at the University of Tennessee trained teachers to use technology to improve their teaching, especially with Open Source Software. The combination of understanding academic writing and how people learn shapes how RefRunner is designed. It's designed to work the way that people do, and works the way that an expert assistant or colleague might if they were to help with your references.

Why RefRunner exists

Managing reference lists is tedious, error-prone, and mostly mechanical—exactly the kind of work that software should handle. RefRunner exists because researchers and editors deserve a tool that actually checks their work against authoritative sources without the danger of a Large Language Model taking your carefully chosen references and making them into something else entirely.

There has been much attention to people having LLMs do their writing and inserting "hallucinated references," but another problem is people who make the mistake of asking an LLM for help formatting their references and having it completely ruin them. Jay has seen many examples of people's references have author names and titles changed at the last step of the writing process, and even a highly respected journal changing names and titles in references of documents in the last stages before publication. RefRunner is designed to just do the rote work so people don't have to.

Contact

Questions, feedback, or bug reports are welcome at jay@literatecomputing.com. See our Testimonials category to read (or write!) a testimonial about RefRunner. You can also publicly report bugs.