News

New reference verification checks

3 August 2026

We’ve added brand-new reference verification checks to help ensure reference lists are not only accurate and correctly styled, but also high quality and appropriate.

• Old references. Identify documents that rely heavily on older sources, which may indicate that more recent research has been overlooked.
• Low reference density. Flag documents with relatively few references for their length, helping identify content that may benefit from stronger supporting evidence.
• Self-citations. Detect documents with a high proportion or high number of self-citations, making it easy to identify potential over-reliance on an author’s previous publications.

These new checks are fully customizable, allowing you to define the thresholds that trigger a flag.

Beyond fixing, styling, and completing references, Merops now provides comprehensive, customizable verification with the following checks:

• Retracted references
• Invalid or fabricated DOIs
• Broken links & DOIs
• Old references
• Low reference density
• Missing references
• Uncited references
• Missing accessed dates
• Self-citations
• References not found in Crossref or PubMed

With these verification checks, Merops helps editors and publishers identify potential issues to be raised with authors long before publication. Merops is the only solution that corrects, styles, and marks up entire documents while completing and comprehensively verifying references— all in a single step.