Case Files
Real checks on real theses, written up afterwards. Every case file starts from something that actually happened in a run — a style detected and then discarded, a surname that matched the wrong paper, a bibliography that balanced only because two entries were the same source. Names and titles are changed; the defect is not. These are the posts to read if you want to know what goes wrong in practice rather than in principle.
'Nelson SD, W.' — anatomy of a mangled author
Vancouver author lists read under APA grammar produce names no human has. How 'Nelson SD, Wong PT' becomes 'Nelson SD, W.', why a wrong parse is worse than no parse, and when a checker should refuse to guess.
From 1 thesis to 5,000: how we test
Every change we ship faces a jury of real theses — currently 105, being collated toward 1,000, headed for 5,000. The corpus method, the defects it surfaced, and the two times it caught our own mistakes.
One author, two spellings, zero matches
A surname spelled two ways — a hyphen, a diacritic, a caps style — can make a citation checker report a missing reference and an orphan that are the same person. How name matching should actually work.
One orphan, one missing: a healthy report
Zero defects is not what a healthy citation report looks like. Reading one realistic report — 213 pairs, one orphan reference, one missing citation — and the two-minute diagnosis for each row.
The APA default that broke every Vancouver thesis
Most citation tools silently assume author–date referencing. Here is what that default does to a numbered Vancouver thesis — including the weeks our own system detected the style, then threw the answer away.
The bare-year bug
A trailing '(2020)' after a shared-author citation is a real citation of a second paper — or a phantom, depending on how it's read. Anatomy of the bare-year defect class and the rule that resolves it.
The checker said 90% of my citations failed. The checker was wrong.
A doctoral thesis was told 90% of its citations were missing. The real defect was one broken assumption — and the true error count was two. How to read a failure report before you panic.
When a university becomes an author
A reference whose 'author' is a department: how affiliations leak into the author slot, why blanket rules break real corporate authors like WHO, and how registry evidence repairs the entry — with your approval.