For Students
Free citation checker. No account needed.
RefRunner/scholar searches academic papers like Google Scholar — but one click adds it to a list of perfectly formatted citations in a Word document. APA, MLA, or Chicago, or anything else. When you're done writing, drag your paper in. It matches every in-text citation to a reference and flags anything missing or wrong — even errors introduced by AI editing. Nothing to install.
How it works
Drag and Drop
Provide your full paper or just your bibliography. No account needed.
See what's real and what's not
Each citation is checked against real academic databases. Wrong authors, bad page numbers, or citations that don't exist are flagged instantly.
Export a clean bibliography
Choose your citation style and copy a perfectly formatted bibliography straight into your paper.
See it in action
Live search
Find any paper in seconds.
Type an author name and a few words from the title. Matching papers appear instantly. Click to add to your bibliography — correctly formatted, DOI included.
Any citation style
Whatever format your professor needs.
APA, MLA, Chicago — just pick it. Your bibliography reformats instantly. Same Zotero formatter, so the punctuation and ordering are always correct.
Citation verification
See every mismatch at a glance.
Drag in your paper. Every in-text citation is matched against the reference list — unmatched citations and uncited references highlighted immediately. Catch problems before you submit.
Source Verification
References validated automatically.
No AI. No hallucinations. Every reference is searched at Crossref, OpenAlex, Open Library, and Google Books. If a source doesn't exist or the details are wrong, you'll find out before your professor does.
Research explorer
Explore connections.
Click an author to see their publications and affiliations. 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.
What RefRunner does for you
Two Search Engines
Scholar mode lets you see what's out there. Live-search finds a particular article with the minimum number of keystrokes. Both build a reference list based on reliable data.
Find Missing References Fast
Have in-text citations but no reference list yet? Type an author name and a word from the title — matching papers appear instantly. Click to add them to your bibliography.
Are Your Sources Real?
RefRunner checks every reference against Crossref, OpenAlex, and other public databases. If a source doesn't exist or the details are wrong, you'll find out before your professor does.
Any Format, Instantly
Export your bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago, or whatever your professor requires. Uses the same formatter as Zotero, so the formatting is correct every time.