Cross Check
Every CitationLab post tagged cross check. 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.
Nothing gets lost: the conservation ledger
A citation checker you can trust must account for every line it read: kept, matched, or set aside — never silently dropped. How CitationLab's conservation ledger works.
Orphan references: entries you never cite
A reference listed but never cited. Where orphans come from, why the heading on your list decides whether they are errors at all, and why a large share of them are not orphans but matching failures.
The seven steps of a Ref[In] annotation
Annotation runs as seven stages in a fixed order, on a frozen session, by one worker — and it will not begin until the ledger balances. What each stage produces, and why every constraint was added after something went wrong without it.
We check the references you already had, not just the ones we found
A citation check that only reports what is missing leaves the risky part untouched. Every reference in your bibliography is independently resolved — including the DOI you supplied, which is followed to see what it actually describes.