I’ve been doing academic editing for more than 25 years; I’ve never seen a references list that completely and accurately represented the references in the text in an unedited draft. It doesn’t matter whether you do your references manually or with software like EndNote or Zotero, it seems to be in the nature of references lists to be incomplete.

In this post, I’ll explain how I check my own and my clients’ references. The process is straightforward, so should be easy for you to adopt, too.

Step one

Open your draft and a new spreadsheet or document. Split your screen so you can see the whole of your draft and reduce the size of the new spreadsheet/document so you can see enough of it to paste copied references into it – I use approximately 80% of the screen for the draft I’m reading and 20% for the new spreadsheet/document.

Then, read through your draft – this is a good time to do final checks on spelling, punctuation, etc. Every time you come to a citation, copy it into a list in your new document. You really only need to copy the relevant name(s) and date so you can quickly see if the source is present in your references list in Step 2.

Every couple of pages or at the end of each subsection, alphabetise your list of references. Once your list is in alphabetical order, you can easily see, for example, that you’ve already copied ‘Jones, 2026’ to the list, so don’t need to do it again.

Here’s how to get standard software to alphabetise for you: Excel, Word, Google docs (this is more involved and requires a browser extension, so I’d use one of the other options), Google sheets.

Step two

When you’ve finished and done a final alphabetical sort of your copied references, compare that list to your references list. In this step, you’re not fixing the format of the entries in that list, but checking these things:

• Are all the sources you copied into your new document present in your references list?
• Are there any sources in your references list that aren’t in your new document? If so, do you need to remove them from the references list or cite them somewhere in the text?
• Are the entries in your references list correctly alphabetised?

Step three

Review the submission guidelines. Journals and publishers usually make these easy to find on their websites. If you can’t find the one for where you’re sending your work, ask your contact at the publishers or have a chat with your subject librarian at your university’s library – they really don’t mind.

In the guidelines, they’ll either tell you which standard referencing system to use (APA, MLA, etc.), or they’ll explain and give examples for their house style. Once you’ve found the examples you need, review the format for each entry in your references list.

If the examples you find aren’t clear, just make sure the entries in your references list are complete and consistent. Most styles need the following information (where available and relevant): author(s) name, date of publication, article/chapter title, journal/book title, page numbers, DOI.

Don’t forget that last one when citing journal articles. Increasingly, journals want you to include the DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, for articles you can access online. Including it makes it easier for all of your readers to find sources they want to read for themselves and shows the journal where you got your information.

I suspect that as academic publishers decide how to respond to authors’ potential use of generative AI, checks of references will become more rigorous. They know that AI hallucinates sources when it can’t find real ones, so checking that your sources actually exist is one way of checking whether you’ve done your own work.

Is this an ideal situation? No, but it’s the one we find ourselves in.

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