This site uses cookies for analytics and ad conversion tracking. No personal data is sold or shared. Do you consent?

RefRunner

👋 First time here? Scroll down to see what RefRunner can do, or .

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.

RefRunner validates references like this:
  • 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
    Checking…
  • 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.

📱 On a phone? Create a free account now and your reference lists will be waiting when start working on your paper.

"RefRunner saved me 3–4 hours of time and corrected many errors that even the publisher had missed. The results were fantastic."

— Kevin Leander, Professor, Vanderbilt University

"This is something I have dreamed about FOR YEARS, and this is making my academic/research life infinitely more efficient." — Trena Paulus, introducing RefRunner in a grad digital research skills course

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.

Reference validation showing DOI verification and metadata

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.

Work explorer showing article details and citation network

How it works

  1. 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.

  2. Verify & Correct

    Every citation is cross-checked against public databases. Missing DOIs are found, wrong ones flagged, details filled in.

  3. Update

    Copy to paste yourself. Export just the bibliography with notes about updated citations. Download your document with updated references.

Spread the word

Know a colleague who wrestles with reference lists? Share RefRunner with them — you'll both get a free month of Subscriber access. Create a free account or to get your personal referral link.

RefRunner for: