Reference List Checker & Formatter (APA, MLA, Harvard, IEEE & More)

About the Reference List Checker & Formatter (APA, MLA, Harvard, IEEE & More)

Paste a reference list, or open the Word file of your essay or thesis, and every entry is checked against the style you choose — APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 (notes and bibliography, or author-date), Harvard (Cite Them Right), IEEE or Vancouver — or the style the list already uses, which the checker recognises. Each entry shows what does not follow the style (full first names where the style wants initials, “and” instead of “&”, title case, a missing volume or page range, a DOI in the old “doi:” form, a hyphen instead of an en dash, “et al.” where the style lists every author) next to MySmartCoPilot’s version of it, made by the same formatters as MySmartCoPilot’s citation generators.

The list as a whole is checked too: alphabetical order or numbering, entries that appear twice, works by the same author in the same year that need a and b, and entries written in another style. With a Word file, the text before the reference list is searched for in-text citations, so you see what is cited but missing from the list, what is listed but never cited, and citations whose year differs from the list. Copy the corrected list with its italics, or download it as a Word file, plain text, BibTeX or RIS.

Common uses

• A last check of an essay, dissertation or thesis bibliography before you hand it in.
• Moving a paper to a journal that uses another style: check the list against the new style and copy the reformatted version.
• Finding references cited in the text but missing from the list, and list entries nobody cites.
• Teachers and supervisors checking a student’s reference list quickly.

What is checked

• Parts the style requires: authors, year (or “n.d.”), title, journal, volume, issue and pages for articles, publisher for books and reports, the book and its editors for chapters, the university for theses, the address and access date for web pages where the style asks for one.
• Authors: initials or full first names, “&” or “and”, and “et al.” — APA 7 lists up to 20 authors; MLA 9 uses “et al.” from three; Chicago 18 lists up to six, then three and “et al.”; IEEE lists up to six; Vancouver (ICMJE) lists six, then “et al.”.
• Titles: sentence case or title case, quotation marks for articles and chapters, and — in Word files, where italics survive — italics for journal and book titles.
• Identifiers and numbers: DOIs as https://doi.org/ links or “doi:” as the style writes them, “Retrieved from”, en dashes or hyphens in page ranges, and the place of publication, which APA 7 and the 13th edition of Cite Them Right no longer give.
• The list: alphabetical order (author-date and notes styles) or numbers running 1, 2, 3 … (IEEE and Vancouver), duplicates, a and b after the year for the same author and year, and entries in another style.

In-text citations (Word files)

When you open a Word file, the reference list is taken from under its last heading named References, Reference list, Bibliography, Works Cited or similar, and the text before it, with its footnotes and endnotes, is searched for citations in the chosen style:

• Author-date (APA, Harvard, Chicago author-date): (Grady et al., 2019, p. 210), Kahneman (2011) and groups such as (Lee & Park, 2021; WHO, 2024).
• MLA: (Grady et al. 210).
• Numbered (IEEE, Vancouver): [3], [1]–[4], (1, 3–5) and superscript numbers.
• Chicago notes and bibliography: whether each first author’s surname appears in the notes.

The result lists citations with no entry, entries never cited, and citations whose year differs from the entry’s.

DOI and ISBN checks

A DOI that belongs to another work, or a year or page range copied wrongly, is one of the most common reference errors. Check DOIs and ISBNs online asks doi.org (and, for books, Open Library) for each record in turn and compares its title, year, first author, journal, volume, issue and first page with the entry. Differences are shown side by side, and Use the record’s details puts the record into the entry — after you have compared it with the work itself, because records can be wrong too.

The checker never invents a source or fills in parts from nowhere: what it cannot read, it tells you.

The style guides followed

• APA 7: APA Style reference examples
• MLA 9: MLA Style Center
• Chicago 18: Chicago Manual of Style citation quick guide
• Harvard: Cite Them Right
• IEEE: IEEE Reference Guide
• Vancouver: Citing Medicine (National Library of Medicine) and the ICMJE Recommendations

The corrected entries come from the formatters of MySmartCoPilot’s Citation Generator, so they match its APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver output.

Limitations

• References are read with rules, not guessed: an entry in an unusual layout can be read wrongly, and the checker then says what it could not read. Correct the parts and check the entry again.
• Italics can only be checked in Word files; pasted text loses them.
• Title capitalisation is checked mechanically: the sentence-case version lowercases names of people, places and organisations, so put their capitals back.
• Journal abbreviations (IEEE, Vancouver) are not checked, and local variations of a style (especially Harvard) differ from the standard version: follow your institution’s or journal’s guide where it differs.
• In-text citations are matched by first author and year (or by number); two works by authors with the same surname in the same year need a look by eye.
• Up to 500 references and Word files up to 25 MB. Old .doc files must be saved as .docx first.

Privacy

Your list and your Word file are read in this browser and never uploaded; the Word file is opened in a background worker on your device. Only when you press “Check DOIs and ISBNs online” does the page send each DOI to doi.org (and the registration agency it forwards to) and each ISBN to Open Library, without cookies or a referrer. The style you choose is remembered in this browser.