Summary
Catch the invented reference before your reader does.
One call says whether a cited paper exists and whether the year, authors and venue you wrote down are the ones on record — with real conflicts kept separate from harmless preprint differences.
What it is
A Python server with a single tool. Give it a title — plus any of authors, year, DOI, arXiv ID or URL — and it looks the paper up across three scholarly databases, then reports whether it exists and whether the metadata you cited matches. Built on academic-refchecker.
What you get
- verify_citation returns a verified true or false, the authoritative metadata it matched, and separate lists of errors, warnings and suggestions
- Hard errors are the ones that should stop you: a genuine year, author or venue mismatch, or a paper that cannot be found
- Warnings are the ones that should not: arXiv v1 against v2, preprint against published venue, or a field you simply did not supply
- A Crossref fuzzy fallback returns the closest variant when the exact title is not found, so a typo and an invented reference look different
Requirements
Python; the package is on PyPI as mcp-refchecker. No account and no key — Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex and Crossref are queried directly.
Setup effort
One command — pip install mcp-refchecker