An AI writer with real citations you can trace and check

Why a general AI chat makes up references

A language model writes whatever is most likely to come next. To the model, a reference is just another pattern: a surname, a year, something that looks like a title and a journal that sounds right. If it doesn’t look anything up first, it can produce a flawless-looking reference to a paper nobody ever wrote.

This has been measured. A study in Scientific Reports asked the two versions of ChatGPT available in 2023 for short literature reviews on 42 topics and traced all 636 references: 55% of those from the older version were fabricated, and 18% from the newer one ^[1]. A separate study of medical content found the same pattern of invented and inaccurate references ^[2]. In a dissertation, a reference that doesn’t exist isn’t a formatting slip. It’s one of the first things a marker checks. There’s more on this, with examples, in why AI makes up citations and how to catch fake ones.

Where Aithor.io gets its sources

The key difference is that Guided writing never cites from memory: it doesn’t recall a reference, it looks it up and copies the record’s details. For each section it runs a search in OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly literature ^[3]. Crossref, the registry behind the DOIs that publishers assign ^[4], is the fallback when OpenAlex isn’t available and the way it identifies works you add yourself by DOI or by pasting a reference. What it finds becomes your paper’s library, and the guide can only cite what’s in that library.

Three rules decide what makes it into your text:

• Language counts. Works in the language of your paper are ranked ahead; works in other languages drop down and only appear when there’s nothing better. If you need sources from a particular country, ask the guide.
• The abstract has to back it up. The guide reads each abstract and cites only when it supports the sentence. A second pass then checks every citation against its abstract and strips the ones that don’t hold up, so a sentence ends up uncited rather than propped up by a decorative reference.
• Your readings count too. Attach a PDF from your reading list, or add a source by hand, and it joins the library like any other work.

In-text citations follow your referencing style, and the reference list builds itself, with a link to each work.

What “real” actually means for a citation

When a tool says it cites real sources, it could mean three different things. It helps to keep them apart:

Level one is where general chatbots fail most visibly. Level three is hard for anyone, including a person in a hurry, and the guide doesn’t fully solve it either. In internal testing, citations not supported by their source fell from 22% to 16%: it does not promise zero errors. So rather than promise you won’t need to check, we give you the tools to do it quickly.

Check every citation against the source

With Aithor Pro, Check against the source gives the exact sentence and page for each citation, only for articles with an open-access PDF (OpenAlex or Unpaywall). Open the citation card, press the button and you get a verdict plus the passage that supports it, highlighted in the PDF. If the article isn’t open access there’s no automatic check, and you’ll need to read it yourself. The full walkthrough is in verifying citations against the original source.

Start for free

What else Guided writing does

Sources are what this page is about, but the guide works through the whole paper with you, from the brief to the file you hand in:

• It starts from your brief. Reads your brief from PDF, Word, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, text or photos (with OCR), up to 20 MB per file and 20 files per paper. From there it picks up the word count, the formatting rules and your title page details.
• The type of paper matters. Essay, dissertation, report, monograph or article: the outline it suggests fits what you’re actually writing.
• Length in words or pages. If you’re given a page count, it converts it to words: 300 words per page in 12-point type at 1.5 spacing (225 double-spaced and 450 single-spaced).
• YouTube videos as sources. Turns a YouTube video into a citable source (from its transcript).
• Tables, charts and images. Adds tables, data charts and Wikimedia Commons images with their author and license. It doesn’t generate AI images.
• Your draft, untouched. Imports your draft without rewriting it and carries on from where you left off.
• Targeted reviews. Ask for a review of coherence, transitions, length or spelling and grammar; each change is marked, and you accept or reject it.
• Ready to submit. With Aithor Pro you download Word, PDF or Markdown, with a title page, linked bibliography, footnotes and table of contents. If your course asks for APA, the formatting details are in writing a paper in APA format.
• Then the defence. Defense mode: asks you about your paper one question at a time and tells you what to review.

How to check a citation by hand

If a reference reaches you from somewhere else (a classmate, a chatbot, an old bibliography), you can verify it in a few minutes:

1. Search the title or DOI in Crossref’s search or in OpenAlex. If it’s in neither, be suspicious.
2. Compare authors, year, journal, volume and pages with your reference. A wrong year or surname is the most common slip.
3. Open the work. Many articles have an open-access version in a university repository or on the journal’s site.
4. Find the point you want to cite. If you quote a figure or a sentence, note the page.
5. If you can’t read the work, don’t cite it as if you had. Find a source you can open.

To find more papers on your topic before you start, use the AI research assistant. If you’re writing a review, the AI literature review generator also documents the search and the screening.

Show how you wrote it, too

Sources are half of the trust question; the other half is process. The Process report sums up what you wrote and what the guide suggested. It measures what happened in the editor: it does not certify that no AI was used.

Aithor.io compared with a general AI chat

The table compares what Guided writing does with what a general-purpose AI chat does by default, with no special instructions or plug-ins.