Last updated 9 September 2026.
1. What this tool is
Phantocite is a free aid for checking references. It looks each reference up in OpenAlex, compares the printed details with that record, and asks a language model whether each citing sentence matches the abstract of the source.
It is an aid, not an authority. It produces leads for a human reviewer. It is not a plagiarism service, not a grading instrument, and not evidence of academic misconduct. Any decision about a person must rest on your own reading of the sources, never on this output alone.
2. What you are responsible for
You are responsible for what you upload. By uploading a document you confirm that:
- you are entitled to share it with this service, and with the third parties named in section 4;
- it contains no personal data that should not leave your institution — in particular, that student names and other identifying details have been removed, and that no special-category data (health, beliefs, and the rest) is present;
- uploading it is permitted by your institution's own policy on generative AI, privacy and assessment, which you have checked;
- you are not using the results for a prohibited or high-risk purpose, such as deciding admission, determining a grade, or monitoring a person.
Documents are processed as they arrive. This service cannot tell whether a document has been anonymised, and does not try to. If you upload personal data, that is your act and your responsibility as the controller of it, not the operator's.
3. Accuracy — no warranty
The tool is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind. In particular:
- It produces false positives and false negatives. A real work can be reported as missing when OpenAlex indexes it oddly or not at all; a fabricated one can occasionally match something.
- The misquote judgement is made from the abstract only. A claim that the full text supports but the abstract does not may be flagged wrongly.
- Metadata differences often reflect the record, not the paper — an online-first year against an issue year, for example.
- Long documents may be checked only in part, within the server's time budget, and are marked as partial when that happens.
Verify every flag by hand before you act on it.
4. What happens to your document
- The language model provider receives the document's text, in order to find the reference list and the citing sentences, and receives the citation snippets and OpenAlex abstracts for the misquote check.
- OpenAlex receives reference titles and DOIs only — never the paper's prose, and never a name from the document.
- Nothing is stored. There is no database and no file storage. Your document exists in memory for the length of the run and is then gone. Results live in your browser only; downloads are produced from what is already on your screen.
- Analytics (Google Analytics, after you accept cookies) records page views and usage, never your document, references or results.
Hosting and network providers may keep their own short-lived request logs, which record the fact of a request rather than its content.
5. Liability
The operator provides this tool free of charge and accepts no liability for any loss or damage arising from its use, from its results, or from its unavailability, to the fullest extent the law allows. That includes any consequence of a document being uploaded in breach of section 2 — that responsibility is the uploader's.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
6. Fair use of the service
The analysis runs on the operator's own API credit. Please use the tool for its purpose and at a human pace. Automated or bulk use, or any attempt to exhaust the service or its credit, is not permitted, and access may be rate-limited, restricted or withdrawn at any time, without notice.
7. Changes
These terms may change; the current version is always the one on this page, with the date at the top. Continuing to use the tool after a change means accepting it.
8. Contact
Phantocite is operated by Daniël van Hemert (Tinybase). For questions about these terms, or to ask that something be looked into, use the contact details at danielvanhemert.com.