# References Validation

> Detect and validate the references and citations in a document against trusted sources with Copyleaks References Validation.

References Validation checks whether the citations in a document are real and accurately described. When enabled, Copyleaks finds every reference in the submitted text, identifies the work it points to, and verifies it against a trusted source, so you can catch fabricated, misattributed, or incorrectly dated citations.

It covers two kinds of references:

- **Academic references** (papers, journal articles) are verified against the Copyleaks academic citation index.
- **Non-academic references** (web pages, documentation, blogs, encyclopedias) are verified by fetching the cited URL and comparing the live page to what was cited.

## Benefits and Use Cases

AI-generated and low-quality writing often includes citations that look real but are not. References Validation surfaces those automatically, helping you:

- **Catch fabricated or hallucinated citations** - references to works that do not exist or cannot be found.
- **Spot misattribution** - wrong authors, wrong year, or a title that does not match the cited source.
- **Verify bibliographies at scale** - check every citation in a submission without manual lookup.

Common use cases:

- **Academic integrity** - flag invented or misquoted sources in student work.
- **Student writing support** - help students improve their citations by catching missing, incorrect, or mismatched references before they submit.
- **Publishing and research** - confirm a manuscript's references are genuine and correctly described before publication.
- **Content review** - assess how trustworthy the cited material in a submitted document is.

## Validation Results

For each detected reference you get what Copyleaks parsed from the citation, the corroborating source it found, and a per-field breakdown of which details matched (title, authors, year). Results are delivered in two places:

- **Completed webhook** - a `referencesValidation.summary` with the headline counts: how many references were found and how many were fully validated.
- **Crawled version** - the full per-reference results, including the parsed fields and the corroborating sources.

## Next steps

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Validate References Guide" icon="circle-check" href="/guides/authenticity/validate-references">Step by step: enable references validation on a scan, read the summary, and fetch the per-reference results.</Card>
  <Card title="References Validation Results" icon="list-check" href="/reference/data-types/authenticity/results/crawled-version#references-validation">The full response schema: parsed fields, suggestions, and per-field signals.</Card>
</CardGroup>