Policies and legal information

Legal disclaimer

Reference Checker & Reformatter is provided as a beta testing reference-validation and bibliography-formatting aid. It is intended to assist users in checking and organizing scholarly references, but it does not replace expert review, journal instructions, publisher requirements, or manual verification.

The application relies on submitted reference text and metadata returned by external sources such as PubMed and Crossref. Database metadata may be incomplete, outdated, duplicated, or incorrect. Users are responsible for verifying all references before submission, publication, legal filing, academic reporting, thesis submission, grant submission, or any other formal use.

No warranty is given that any reference, citation style, DOI, PMID, PMCID, author list, journal name, volume, issue, page number, or publication year is complete or error-free. Use of the application is at the user’s own discretion and responsibility.

Usage policy

• Use the application only for lawful academic, research, teaching, manuscript-preparation, and administrative purposes.
• Do not upload confidential, restricted, copyrighted, or third-party material unless you have the right to process it.
• Do not use the application to submit abusive, malicious, automated, or excessive requests to external metadata services.
• Review-required references should be checked manually before acceptance.
• Exact matches may still require journal-specific manual verification.
• The application may be rate-limited or temporarily unavailable if PubMed, Crossref, hosting, network, or database services are unavailable.

Privacy policy

The application processes reference text entered or uploaded by users for the purpose of creating reference batches, checking metadata, displaying review decisions, and generating formatted outputs.

To support the batch-review workflow, the application may store submitted references, database matches, accepted/rejected/manual-edit decisions, and exported metadata in its MySQL database. Hosting providers may also maintain standard server logs such as IP address, browser information, request time, and error logs.

The application may also record privacy-safe usage analytics such as page views, batch creation, number of references checked, source searches, export actions, and share clicks. The built-in usage tracker stores browser/session identifiers and a hashed IP value for aggregate reporting; it does not store raw IP addresses in the usage analytics table. Optional external analytics may be enabled by the administrator for general traffic measurement.

Reference queries may be sent to external metadata services such as PubMed/NCBI and Crossref to retrieve bibliographic information. These external services operate under their own terms and privacy practices.

The application is designed as a metadata-based tool and does not use AI processing for reference correction. Users should avoid submitting sensitive personal information, confidential manuscripts, unpublished data, or restricted documents unless the hosting environment has been approved for that use.

For deletion or correction requests relating to stored batches, contact the application administrator through the Contact us page.