Fact-checking and reference verification in the age of AI-assisted research

With authors increasingly leaning on LLMs and artificial intelligence in their research processes, especially to ensure completeness in their bibliographies and works cited lists, issues of imprecise references, unsound citations, and errant metadata are becoming very common.

It is a slow and thorny business checking and correcting incorrect references. It is, nevertheless, a task Lex Academic gladly provides with efficiency and rigour, alongside our scrupulous fact-checking work.

Thanks to our access to most digital libraries through our alma maters, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, and to our team’s exceptional digital literacy, no stone is left unturned in procuring the correct details for your citations. Our goal is to ensure that all references properly support the claims to which they are attached in your prose, usually through footnotes or endnotes. As such, our reference verification work seeks to do more than just cross-check the metadata for given sources (e.g. page numbers, author names, or the correct volume of a given periodical): we will establish whether the source supplied actually provides the support, corroboration, or point of contrast (e.g. when using ‘cf.’) that your argument propounds. Where your cited source does not do this adequately, accurately, or satisfactorily, we will supply an alternative reference that offers (as befits the case) the corroboration or contrast needed. We can also, or instead, provide a full itemised report on the discrepancies between cited sources and your argument’s citation-requiring claims.

All of our verification work is done manually by academic researchers, and with tremendous care. We understand you may have relied on various AI tools to source or generate your references. We therefore do not rely on the same technologies to ascertain the soundness of your sources. In fact, we are an AI-free company. All verification work is done with painstaking precision to ensure that your research can be fully supported by the existing literature, without mistakes or misattributions.

Legal verification work

Although we undertake reference verification work across all academic disciplines, we have special expertise in law and jurisprudence, serving legal scholars, academic jurists, and attorneys/solicitors conducting legal research as part of the analytical duties of their profession. Secondarily, we are extremely comfortable fact-checking history, philosophy, classics, and the kindred humanities.

Get in touch

Please get in touch with our CEO, Louise Chapman, to discuss your needs and to get your references verified in a way that means your work can move through peer review without pushback for lack of soundness, accuracy, or completeness.

Can we help with anything else?

Ensure that your manuscript is submission-ready with our bespoke Indexing and Developmental Editing services. We are famous for purveying extraordinary academic proofreading, copy-editing, and developmental editing. Our impeccable author services include correcting all typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. Where desired, we can make stylistic and substantive changes to your work that promise a powerful first impression with major publishers. Our authors have published with all of the top-tier publishing houses, including Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Peter Lang, Princeton University Press, and Routledge.