A coworker asked me to build a small tool for checking academic references.
Part of his job is reviewing references and making sure the papers actually exist and the information is correct.
His workflow was basically:
Ctrl+C → search → open the paper → check DOI, authors, title, journal, year → record the result
Then repeat it for the next reference.
And sometimes there are hundreds of references to check.
So he asked me if I could automate some of it.
I built a very simple internal tool first.
He shared it with a few coworkers, and that's where things got interesting. They started finding cases that the first version couldn't handle:
DOI doesn't match the paper
title or author information is different
wrong journal or publication year
incomplete metadata
the paper can't be found at all
So I kept adding checks and fixing edge cases.
Eventually, that little internal tool became CiteWise.
The idea behind CiteWise is pretty simple: instead of just formatting a citation, it checks whether the reference itself looks correct.
You can use it to verify DOI and bibliographic information, find mismatches, and check references in batches.
CiteWise: [https://cietwise.dev]
I'm putting it out there now and would like to see how other people handle this problem.
If you've ever had to manually check a large bibliography, what does your workflow look like?
