Paste a claim or topic to find candidate academic papers, or paste a DOI to look up a specific paper and see related work. Searches CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex directly from your browser.
Scholarly Source Check searches three academic databases for papers that might be relevant to a claim, topic, or specific DOI you provide. It returns candidate sources — papers that exist and appear topically related. It does not check whether the specific passage in any of those papers actually supports your specific claim. That distinction matters: a citation that exists is not the same as a citation that supports what it is attached to.
This tool also searches academic literature only — peer-reviewed papers, preprints, and scholarly publications indexed by CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex. It does not search regulatory text, government and policy documents, financial filings, news reporting, or other non-academic source types. If your claim concerns a regulatory obligation, a compliance requirement, or a question that depends on primary-source government or financial documents, this tool will not surface the right material — that is a different and broader evidence problem, which is what the full Epistamate engine is built to address.
The DOI registration agency for scholarly content, run as a non-profit membership organisation. Provides metadata for over 150 million records.
crossref.org →A free, AI-powered research tool from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a non-profit research institute.
semanticscholar.org →An open, comprehensive catalogue of the global research system, maintained by OurResearch, a non-profit.
openalex.org →Queries run directly from your browser to each provider's public API. No query text, claim, or search term is sent to or stored by Epistamate. Results are deduplicated by DOI and title. Coverage, metadata accuracy, and availability are determined by each provider and may vary by field, publisher, and access status.
The optional "Check claim" button is the one exception: it sends the claim and the paper's abstract to Epistamate's server, which checks it against a language model and returns a verdict. Nothing is stored — the request is processed and discarded — but unlike the search above, this one step does pass through Epistamate's infrastructure rather than going straight to the academic databases.
The gap between a citation existing and a citation actually entailing the claim it is attached to is the core problem Epistamate's evidence engine is built to address — at the claim level, across academic, regulatory, and policy sources, with contradictions surfaced and gaps named rather than papered over.
Yes. Scholarly Source Check is free and requires no signup. It searches CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex for candidate academic papers related to a claim, topic, or DOI you provide.
No. A candidate result means a paper exists and is topically related — not that its content supports the specific claim attached to it. Citations that exist but do not support what they're cited for are a documented, common problem in published research.
Yes. AI systems and human authors alike can cite real, existing papers in ways that misrepresent, overstate, or contradict what those papers actually say. Verifying a citation exists is a different and easier problem than verifying it supports the claim attached to it.
Completely free, no account required. Queries run directly from your browser to each provider's public API — no query text or claim is sent to or stored by Epistamate for the search feature.
CrossRef (the DOI registration agency, 150M+ records), Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI), and OpenAlex (an open catalogue of the global research system maintained by OurResearch).