Free document tools•POST /v1/verify-references
Fact-check AI-generated research before you publish
Supported Formats: Whitepapers (PDF), Manuscripts & Submissions, Consulting Decks, Articles & Draft Copy
Core Verification Mechanisms: DOI Crossref Match · Live URL Health · Arithmetic Recomputation
Need copy-paste code with sandbox testing?Open Developer Playbook (cURL / Python / MCP) →
The problem
AI research tools produce confident reports with fabricated citations — references that don’t exist, or real sources that say something completely different.
Checking 60 citations by hand takes hours, so in practice nobody does it until a client or judge catches a hallucinated source.
How Stipple helps
Stipple resolves every citation, matches academic DOIs to catch "right link, wrong paper", recomputes internal statistical tables, and validates claim support.
Produces a permanent, shareable verification permalink you can attach to client deliverables.
The call
View Full Recipe →bash
curl -X POST https://www.stipple.sh/v1/verify-references \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com/research-report.pdf"}'
# → { "summary": { "headline": "60/63 citations resolve; 3 dead links" },
# "permalink": "https://www.stipple.sh/fc/research-report-…" }Establish a strict publishing gate: no AI report ships without an auditable fact-check badge.
How the corpus was built, what was caught, and what the method does not prove.
Questions
- Can this check a freelance submission or a manuscript before we run it?
- Yes, and it is the cheapest place to catch the problem. Send the draft or its URL and every cited source is fetched: each reference comes back resolved, unreachable, or dead, with the URL and the failure reason. On our own benchmark of 101 references across 19 AI-written briefs, 39 did not exist as cited — so on a contributed piece the question is not whether to check, but when.
- Does a resolving citation mean the claim it supports is true?
- No. Resolving means the source exists and could be fetched, which is a lower bar than saying it backs the sentence attached to it. Claims are checked for support against the source where the text allows it, but a live URL alone is not agreement. The result separates those two things deliberately rather than collapsing them into one score.
- What if the source is paywalled or behind a bot wall?
- It comes back unreachable, and that is not the same as fabricated. Our benchmark review found four bot-wall false alarms among the candidates, which is exactly why the output names the URL and the reason instead of returning a verdict. An editor reads unreachable as “open this one yourself”, not as proof of invention.
- Is this the right page for a legal brief?
- Use the legal brief checker instead — same engine, but written for filing risk, and honest about the fact that case citations are verified by fetching the cited source rather than by looking it up in a case-law database.
- What does a citation check actually verify?
- That the cited source exists and resolves, and in claim-to-source mode whether that source supports the claim attached to it. It cannot check a claim that carries no citation at all; an uncited claim is reported as uncited rather than passed.
- What was measured?
- A corpus of 101 requested citations, with the method and the failure breakdown in the benchmark. The rate was substantially worse on thin topics, which is where fabricated citations tend to live.