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Automatic citation checking for student papers

Verifying references by hand during grading is slow and easy to game.

The problem

Checking whether a student’s references are real and correctly cited is tedious to do by hand, and mismatched or invented citations are easy to miss at grading time.

The approach

I built an internal tool that reads the citations out of a paper, looks up each one’s DOI, and checks the cited title against the registered one. References that don’t match get flagged for a closer look, so what used to be a slow manual check becomes a quick first pass.