Citation link checker: find the citations in a report that point nowhere

Citation link checker

Find the citations in a report that point nowhere. Your document is read in this browser and never uploaded: only the links it contains are checked.

Drop a PDF or Word document here

Choose a file

The document is read in this browser tab and is never uploaded. To check whether a link works, the link itself is requested.

Check links via dataactivists.org Your browser cannot read the result of a request to most government, NGO, and publisher sites, so on its own it can rarely tell a working page from a missing one. Checking through this site's server gets a real answer: the browser will settle 10% of links on average, while the server will manage to resolve 90%. The server receives the list of links and nothing else: never the document, its name or its text, and no logs are kept of any links checked. Untick to check from this browser alone: fewer definitive answers, but the links go only to the sites cited.

Checked document

Outcome	Link

How to read these results

Need to know whether the quote is actually in the source?

This checker asks whether a link resolves. AdvocacyLab's quote checker goes one step further: upload a report and it reads each cited source and reports whether the quote is really there.

Access is invite-only. Sign in at advocacylab.dataactivists.org , or email advocacylab@dataactivists.org to request access.

Features and limitations

To read before you rely on it.

The document never leaves your browser

It is parsed in this tab by code that ships with the page. There is no upload endpoint, so there is nowhere for the file to go: the text, the author, even the file name are only ever visible to your browser.

No AI anywhere in the process

URLs are found by pattern matching and by reading the link data embedded in the file, then checked over HTTP. Every result is reproducible, and every row says which route produced it. Nothing is generated or inferred.

The links are checked through your browser or our server

Checking a citation means asking a server whether the page is there. By default that request goes through dataactivists.org, which only ever sees the links and keeps no logs of them. Any links still unresolved are then looked up at archive.org.

A dead link is not a fake one

Links that fail are looked up in the Internet Archive. A snapshot means the page existed and has since moved: the citation is stale, and the snapshot is usually the source you want. A link that is gone and was never archived is the one to worry about.

Finds dead links, not false claims

A citation that resolves can still be a real page saying nothing like what the text claims. This narrows a manual review to the citations worth pulling on, but does not replace reading them.

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