Check your citation style and bibliography
Citation mistakes look like carelessness to an examiner, and a source that does not exist can cost far more than points. The good news: most mistakes are mechanical and can be found before you submit.
First: your guidelines decide
APA, Harvard or footnotes: which citation style applies is set by your institution, often even by your programme. There is no single standard for all universities. So check against your own guidelines, not against a generic guide from the internet.
The most common mistakes
- A source is cited in the text but missing from the bibliography, or the other way round.
- The format changes within the thesis, e.g. “Müller 2020” next to “(Müller, 2020, p. 12)”.
- Direct quotations without a page number.
- Secondary citations not marked as such (e.g. “cited in”).
- The year or edition in the text does not match the bibliography entry.
- Web sources without an access date where your guidelines require one.
- Sources that do not exist at all.
Invented sources: the new risk
Language models like ChatGPT produce references that look plausible but do not exist. A study in Scientific Reports found that 55% of the references ChatGPT generated were fabricated with GPT-3.5, and still 18% with GPT-4 (Walters & Wilder, 2023). Copy such a reference unchecked and you cite a work your examiner cannot find.
The check is simple: every journal source with a DOI must resolve via that DOI, and title, authors and year must match.
How Roastgaard checks your sources
Roastgaard matches the sources in your thesis against the DOI registry (Crossref) and flags references that cannot be confirmed. Upload your institution’s guidelines and the citation style is checked against exactly those rules. When Roastgaard suggests literature for a weakly supported passage, every suggestion is verified against Crossref first, so no invented source slips into your thesis.