Check references
check_referencesUse this when the user wants to check references or citations from any source: a manuscript, a bibliography, a literature review, or citations an AI assistant gave earlier in the conversation. It reports whether each one exists, points to the right paper, or has been retracted, corrected or flagged, for questions like "are these references real?", "is this paper retracted?" or "is this DOI right?". Send citations from earlier in the conversation exactly as given, without correcting them first. Send every reference in the list as its own item, with or without a DOI (one without a DOI is matched by title and first author), with the full text as written, plus its DOI and title when you can read them, and any authors, journal, link, identifier or cite key you can read (the title lets a broken DOI be told apart from a missing work); up to 100 per call. For a whole reference list, such as the References section of an attached paper or a bibliography, send it as written, one reference per line, in reference_list instead of items: every reference in it is checked, in parts when it is long; call again with start_at as the result says until the whole list is done. When the whole original list's count is known, send it as expected_reference_count on every part; do not send a sample or reduce that count to fit a shortened input. Results come from Crossref, the DOI registry and Retraction Watch, and for references without a DOI also Semantic Scholar, PubMed, arXiv and, for books, Open Library; the manuscript itself is not sent. Do not use it to find new sources, to format citations, or to judge whether a source supports a claim. Report as the result's how_to_report says: each status as returned (for example "resolves" or "not found"), explained with the row detail; do not describe results as verified, fabricated or safe to cite. A reference with a DOI is compared by DOI and title only; one without a DOI must match a work by title and author.
Tool call template
This tool declares no required parameters. Add optional parameters from the input schema as needed.
{
"id": 1,
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"arguments": {},
"name": "check_references"
}
}Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| start_at | No | For reference_list only: the list position to continue from, as the previous result's progress.next_start_at says. | |
| references | No | The references to check, one item each. Leave out when sending reference_list. | |
| reference_list | No | A whole reference list as written, one reference per line, keeping any numbers: numbered, author-year, BibTeX, RIS or CSL-JSON, for example a paper's whole References section. | |
| expected_reference_count | No | The number of references in the whole original list, when known, not the current part. A differing parsed count stops the check before lookup; resend the complete input rather than lowering this count. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| rows | Yes | ||
| counts | Yes | ||
| progress | No | ||
| checked_at | Yes | ||
| licensed_by | Yes | ||
| how_to_report | No | ||
| retraction_data_as_of | Yes | ||
| retraction_data_complete | Yes |