Verify AI-generated sources on Chrome before you trust the citation trail.
Start with one questionable citation, preserve the title, author, date, publication, and claim it is supposed to support, then run a FactSentinel check before you cite, share, publish, or teach from it.
Do not check the whole bibliography first.
AI-written drafts, article summaries, and research notes can contain real-looking references that are wrong, missing, or attached to claims they do not support. A practical Chrome workflow starts with one source claim and asks whether the citation exists and supports the sentence in front of you.
1. Preserve the citation
Copy the title, author, date, publication, DOI, URL, or reference-list entry exactly as shown. Keep the claim it is supposed to support.
2. Run FactSentinel
Use the browser extension or web checker to review the claim, source trail, reasoning, confidence, model agreement, and caveats.
3. Open the evidence
Check whether the source exists, whether the metadata matches, and whether the source actually supports the article sentence.
Source trails worth checking first.
The best first check is narrow enough to inspect manually after FactSentinel gives you a structured pass.
AI-generated references
- Reference lists with polished but unfamiliar titles.
- DOIs or URLs that do not resolve.
- Authors attached to publications they did not write.
Article citations
- Claims sourced to unnamed studies.
- Statistics where the linked article discusses a different metric.
- Quotes that appear only in summaries.
Suspicious source lists
- References that all point to the same weak source.
- Official-looking citations with missing dates.
- Secondary articles used as primary evidence.
What a useful source check should answer.
The output should help you decide whether the source trail is credible, unsupported, mismatched, or worth escalating to deeper research.
Existence
- Can the cited source be found?
- Do the title, author, outlet, year, and URL match?
- Is the source primary, secondary, or unclear?
Support
- Does the source support the exact wording?
- Did the article stretch a narrow finding?
- Are caveats missing from the citation trail?
Next action
- Open the original source.
- Search for the cited phrase or data point.
- Slow down when evidence is missing.
Use this with recent FactSentinel workflows.
This page is the citation-focused path. Pair it with the broader Chrome article guide and the public fake-sources case study when you need to show a complete first-success workflow.
Install, then check one questionable source.
Open the download page, install the Chrome extension, and run a first-success check on one citation, article source, or reference-list entry from the page you already have open.