Citation Matching
Every CitationLab post tagged citation matching. This topic runs through several posts across the blog — case files where it caused a real problem, and guides for handling it in your own reference list.
Deterministic first, AI second — and why the order is the whole design
Why CitationLab settles what it can with rules before any model is consulted, and what that ordering buys you in a reference check you can actually verify.
Et al. done right
How many authors et al. may stand in for, when it may first appear, and whether the reference list may use it at all are decided by your style. What the rules are, and why the abbreviation is the most information-destroying thing you can do to a citation.
How to find citations missing from your bibliography
A citation with no matching reference entry is the most common correction examiners send back. How to find every missing reference in your thesis — by hand, and with the traps that fool the manual check.
Match 10 — what the first ten pairs tell you, and what they don't
The first ten matched pairs are free. A sample of ten answers one question about a reference list well, hints at a second, and structurally cannot answer the third — which is the one most people assume it covers.
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.
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.