What is Citely?
Citely is a specialized AI-powered research assistant designed to solve the growing problem of AI hallucinations and citation errors in academic writing. Unlike general AI tools that may fabricate sources, Citely acts as a rigorous verification layer that cross-references text and bibliographies against authoritative global databases like CrossRef, PubMed, arXiv, and Google Scholar.
It serves as a bridge between the speed of AI-assisted drafting and the strict integrity required by the scientific community, ensuring that every claim is backed by a legitimate, peer-reviewed source.
Key Features of Citely
- AI Source Finder: Recovers original source documents even from messy, incomplete, or misspelled inputs.
- Real-Time Verification: Instantly flags hallucinated or non-existent citations generated by other AI tools.
- Reverse Reference Lookup: Allows users to paste a claim or paragraph to find existing scholarly papers that support the argument.
- Batch Processing: Validates entire bibliographies or long reference lists in seconds.
- Automatic Formatting: Exports verified citations into major styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and IEEE.
Who Can Use Citely?
- PhD Students & Researchers: To ensure their literature reviews and theses are error-free before submission.
- University Professors: To verify the authenticity of student submissions and maintain academic standards.
- Journal Editors: To screen manuscripts for fake or fabricated references during the peer-review process.
- Content Teams: To maintain factual accuracy in technical or medical white papers.
Why is it Better than its Competitors?
- Hallucination Detection: Unlike Google Scholar, Citely specifically highlights fake references that look real but don’t exist.
- Fuzzy Matching: It can reconstruct a correct citation even if the author’s name is misspelled or the year is wrong, whereas traditional databases often return no results.
- Integrated Workflow: It combines finding, verifying, and formatting in one platform, eliminating the need to jump between multiple tools.
- Multilingual Support: It offers robust verification for both English and Chinese academic sources.
Citely is an all-in-one academic integrity platform that unifies an AI source finder, a citation verifier, and a research assistant. The tool is built to streamline the Find → Verify → Cite workflow, allowing users to move from a rough draft to a submission-ready manuscript with total confidence. By integrating directly with the world’s most trusted scholarly indexes, Citely provides a truth-risk score for references, ensuring that no fabricated or retracted data ruins a researcher’s reputation.
2025
Suffolk, United Kingdom
Private
The team behind Citely consists of academic researchers and AI enthusiasts from various universities who experienced firsthand the boring and long process of manual citation checking. Their mission is to restore trust in academic writing by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to automate the most tedious parts of research. They focus on transparency and integrity, offering a tool that is both technologically advanced and deeply rooted in scholarly values.
Monthly
$19 /month
MonthlyYearly
$14 /month
YearlyBeliever
$347 /once
Pay OnceCan Citely find a source if I only have a partial title?
Yes, its AI is designed to perform fuzzy searches to locate the correct paper using whatever metadata you provide.
Does it work with ChatGPT-generated text?
Yes. It is specifically used to verify if the sources ChatGPT provides are real or hallucinations.
Is my research data kept private?
Yes, Citely uses encryption for all processed text and does not share your data with third parties.
Can I export my list to Zotero or Mendeley?
Yes, Citely supports exports that are compatible with major reference managers.
Does it support non-English papers?
It has strong support for English and Chinese, with more languages being added to its index.
How accurate is the verification?
It boasts over 95% accuracy by cross-referencing multiple authoritative databases simultaneously.
Citely addresses the crisis of truth in the age of AI-generated content. While other tools focus on discovery, Citely focuses on validity, a critical distinction for anyone whose career depends on the accuracy of their citations.
Pros
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Eliminates the risk of citing fake AI-generated papers.
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Saves hours of manual cross-referencing across PubMed and Google Scholar.
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User-friendly interface requiring no technical expertise.
Cons
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Requires a paid subscription for full batch-processing features.
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Heavily focused on academic sources; less effective for general web news.
Final Verdict
Citely is an essential tool for any serious researcher who wants to ensure their work is bulletproof against errors and AI hallucinations.
CA Tushar Makkar
