DiFlowRin Verified References

Description

AI writing tools invent sources that look real, and even careful authors get years, journals and DOIs wrong. DiFlowRin Verified References checks every source of a post against public academic databases right in the block editor, and shows your references as a formatted list your readers and search engines can trust.

Check the sources of a post

Open the DiFlowRin Verified References panel in the block editor and click Check references. The plugin finds the references of the post on its own:

• References blocks,
• a list or paragraphs under a “References”, “Bibliography”, “Sources” or “Works cited” heading (or a reference-like list at the end of the post),
• footnotes,
• DOI, arXiv and PubMed links anywhere in the text.

You can also paste a bibliography (up to 100 references, any style, BibTeX or RIS). Each reference gets one of four verdicts:

• Confirmed – found in a database, and the details match.
• Wrong details – the work exists, but the year, authors, title, journal or DOI differ from the record. Both values are shown side by side, and Correct in the post replaces the reference with the record, written in your citation style. (No correction is offered when the authors differ: that is usually a different work with a similar title.)
• Not confirmed – no good match in the databases. This does not mean the source is fake: older books, local publications, theses and reports are often missing. Links to Google Scholar and WorldCat help you check by hand.
• Web source – a web page (report, policy, news, blog). The plugin asks the Internet Archive whether the page existed.

Download the results as a text report or a CSV table. Optionally, the pre-publish checks remind you about references that were not confirmed. It is only a reminder: publishing is never blocked.

Show a formatted reference list

Add the References block and add sources one by one, by DOI, ISBN, arXiv or PubMed ID, or as full text, or paste a whole bibliography. Found references are formatted automatically in:

• APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago (author-date), Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver or ISO 690,

set for the whole site or for each block. The list is rendered on the server, so changing the style later reformats every post without editing it again.

• DOIs and source addresses become links.
• Each reference gets a numbered anchor (#ref-1, #ref-2…), so citations in your text can link to it.
• The references are added to the page’s schema.org data as the article’s citation property, each with the type that fits (ScholarlyArticle, Book, Chapter, WebPage). With Yoast SEO they join its Article data.
• Check results are saved with each reference and shown only to editors in the block editor. Visitors never see them.

Who it is for

• Health, nutrition, finance and science sites, where sources matter for readers and for search engines (E-E-A-T).
• Researchers, PhD students and teachers with their own blogs.
• Consultants and analysts who publish reports and case studies.
• Content teams that use AI for drafting and want to catch invented sources before publishing.

Light by design

• Nothing runs on the front end except one small stylesheet, loaded only where a References block is shown. No JavaScript for visitors.
• The editor script loads only in the block editor, and checks start only when you ask.
• No new database tables, no tracking, no account, no limits, nothing to pay.

DiFlowRin Verified References uses the same checking engine as Fake Citation Detector, a free browser extension for Chrome and Edge by the same author.

Going further: does the source support the claim?

This plugin checks that each source exists and is cited correctly. It does not read the sources. For that, the same author makes DiFlowRin Research, a Windows app whose Verify citations feature is free (no licence) and uses your own AI key: AI reads the full text of every source and checks each cited sentence against it. The plugin shows one link to it in its panel and one on its settings page; nothing else.

External services

All checks run in the author’s browser, only when an author clicks a check button or adds a reference to a References block, and only with data taken from the post’s references. Nothing is sent to the plugin author. Each request carries the contact email set in the settings (or, if empty, the plugin author’s address admin@diflowrin.com), as Crossref, OpenAlex and NCBI ask of tools that use their APIs. Like any web request, each service also sees the author’s IP address and browser details.

• Crossref (api.crossref.org) – looks up DOIs and searches by the text of the reference. Sent: the DOI or the reference text. API documentation, privacy policy.
• OpenAlex (api.openalex.org), run by OurResearch – looks up DOIs and searches by title. Sent: the DOI or the title. Terms, privacy policy.
• DataCite (api.datacite.org) – looks up DOIs of datasets and preprints, including arXiv, and searches arXiv records by title. Sent: the DOI, arXiv ID or title. API documentation, terms, privacy policy.
• doi.org (DOI Foundation) – checks whether a DOI is registered when no database has its details. Sent: the DOI. Documentation, privacy policy.
• PubMed / PubMed Central (eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), U.S. National Library of Medicine – looks up PubMed and PMC IDs. Sent: the ID. E-utilities documentation, policies.
• Open Library (openlibrary.org), Internet Archive – looks up books by ISBN and by title and author. Sent: the ISBN, or the title and first author. API documentation, terms and privacy.
• Semantic Scholar (api.semanticscholar.org), Allen Institute for AI – a last search by title. Sent: the title. API license, terms, privacy policy.
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine (archive.org) – asked whether a cited web page was saved. Sent: the page address and the cited year. API documentation, terms and privacy.

Only when you choose “open the cited pages through this site” in the settings: your server requests the cited web pages (public addresses that appear in a post’s references) on behalf of logged-in authors, and, when a page is gone, its saved copy on web.archive.org. Sent: a request for that address, with a user agent naming the plugin and your site.

Only when you turn on the badge: a link to diflowrin.com, the plugin author’s site, is shown under reference lists that were checked. Nothing is sent unless a visitor clicks it. Privacy policy.

The DiFlowRin Verified References panel and the settings page each show one link to DiFlowRin Research on diflowrin.com. Nothing is sent unless you click it.

The links offered for checking by hand (Google Scholar, WorldCat, Google Books, DOI pages) are ordinary links: nothing is sent to those sites unless you click them.

Privacy

The plugin collects no data about visitors, sets no cookies and sends no usage statistics. Check results are saved in the post (as block attributes, visible only to people who can edit it). Database answers are cached in the author’s own browser (IndexedDB) for up to 30 days, so checking a post again is fast and the free databases get fewer requests. The plugin adds suggested text to Settings → Privacy → Policy Guide.

If you turn on the page proxy, the plugin counts page requests per user for 10 minutes, to enforce its limits.

Source code

The editor script build/editor.js is built with esbuild from the TypeScript sources in src/editor/, src/sidebar/ and src/block-references/, the shared checking engine in src/core/ and the shared citation formatter in src/shared/. To rebuild: npm install, then npm run build.