About Refvera

Refvera is a source-checking engine: paste in a reference list and every reference is checked against open registries. The name comes from ref (reference) and the Latin vera – “true”. That is exactly the question the engine answers: does the source exist?

The method

Each reference is parsed (APA, Vancouver, Chicago, MLA), looked up in eight open registries – CrossRef, OpenAlex, Open Library, Libris, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the National Library of Norway, the Norwegian Parliament's open data and Lovdata's open dataset – and judged field by field: title, authors, year, journal, volume, pages, DOI and date codes. If the precise searches find nothing, a safety net takes over with broader searches; finally the engine looks for near-matches for garbled references. Retracted research is flagged.

The honesty principle

Refvera never claims a source is fake. The answers are found (with a link and a list of confirmed fields), partial match (with the deviations shown) or not found in these sources (with the list of registries that were searched). Municipal documents and other grey literature are rarely registered – the engine says so plainly instead of pretending otherwise. That is also why there is no red in Refvera. Refvera checks that sources exist and that the details match – it does not replace reading the sources, and it never judges.

The testing

The engine is validated against a test bank of more than 50 documented error classes: fabricated sources, real DOIs pasted onto the wrong references, wrong years, swapped first authors, retracted articles and more. The whole test bank runs before every single change to the engine – no change ships with deviations.

Privacy as a principle

Pasted text is processed only in memory during the lookup and is never stored. Free use requires no login, and there is no tracking beyond ordinary operational logs. Card payments are handled entirely by Stripe. More about privacy. Terms.

Who is behind it

Refvera is built by Terje Lien, a Norwegian senior secondary teacher (lektor) who teaches and runs courses on practical, responsible AI use through Smartbruk. The tool grew out of a concrete need in the classroom and in the public sector: a fast, verifiable way to answer the question “do these sources exist?” – without accusations and without black boxes.

Contact: post@refvera.com

Credits

Refvera contains data under NLOD 2.0 from Lovdata and builds on open APIs from CrossRef, OpenAlex, Open Library, the National Library of Sweden (Libris), Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the National Library of Norway and the Norwegian Parliament. Thanks to everyone who keeps knowledge registries open.