Academic citation — verify with OpenAlex
Detects inline academic citations like '(Smith, 2023)' and verifies them against the OpenAlex database of 250M+ scholarly works.
What ProfText flags
Academic citation detected. Please verify this source exists.
How to fix it
Check Google Scholar or your library. Upgrade to Pro for automatic verification.
Why this matters
LLMs hallucinate citations with alarming fluency: plausible authors, plausible years, plausible journal names, none of which exist. Inline citations of the form '(Author, Year)' or '(Author et al., Year)' are easy to generate and hard to verify by eye. ProfText extracts each one and queries the OpenAlex open scholarly index — over 250 million works — for a match. Unmatched citations are flagged for manual review. This is the single most valuable check for academic and journalistic writing produced with AI assistance.
Languages
Detection pattern
\(([A-Z][a-zÀ-ÿ'-]+(?:\s+(?:&|and)\s+[A-Z][a-zÀ-ÿ'-]+)?(?:\s+et\s+al\.?)?)\s*,\s*(\d{4}[a-z]?)\)Runs in your browser. No signup. Free tier covers all 30 detection rules.