sourceverify

Verify scholarly references from the command line. Uses the SourceVerify API to check whether citations are real, fabricated, or contain errors.

Installation

npm install -g sourceverify-cli

Or run without installing:

npx sourceverify verify "Smith, J. (2020). Title. Journal, 1(2), 3-4."

Setup

Get your API key at sourceverify.ai/account/api-keys, then:

export SOURCEVERIFY_API_KEY=sk_...

| Variable | Required | Description | |----------|----------|-------------| | SOURCEVERIFY_API_KEY | Yes | Your API key | | SOURCEVERIFY_BASE_URL | No | Override API base URL (defaults to https://sourceverify.ai) |

Commands

verify — Submit and wait for results

sourceverify verify "Vaswani, A. et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. NeurIPS."
sourceverify verify --timeout 60 refs.txt

Submits references, polls until all results are ready (default timeout: 300 seconds). On timeout, prints job IDs so you can check later with results.

• --timeout N — Maximum seconds to wait (default 300)
• Accepts .txt or .csv files — reads one reference per line
• Maximum 20 references per request

submit — Fire and forget

sourceverify submit "ref1" "ref2" "ref3"
sourceverify submit refs.txt

Submits references and immediately returns job IDs and a document ID. Check results later with history or results.

results — Check job status

sourceverify results <jobId> [<jobId> ...]

balance — Check token balance

sourceverify balance

history — View past verifications

sourceverify history                    # Last 20 documents
sourceverify history --limit 1          # Most recent document
sourceverify history --limit 5 -v       # With parsed field details
sourceverify history --offset 20        # Pagination

cancel — Cancel pending jobs

sourceverify cancel <jobId> [<jobId> ...]

Cancels in-progress jobs and refunds tokens.

File Input

Both verify and submit accept .txt and .csv file paths. Each non-empty line is treated as one reference:

sourceverify verify refs.txt
sourceverify verify refs.txt "Another, A. (2023). Inline ref. Journal, 1, 2-3."

AI Agent Workflow

AI coding agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) can use the CLI to verify references without blocking:

# 1. Submit references (instant, non-blocking)
sourceverify submit "Vaswani, A. et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. NeurIPS."

# 2. Do other work...

# 3. Check if results are ready
sourceverify history --limit 1

For native MCP integration, see @sourceverify/mcp-server.

Token Usage

Each reference costs 1 token. Tokens are reserved on submission and committed when verification completes. Failed or cancelled verifications are refunded.