Editorial Process

How CiteGenie sources, fact-checks, updates, and corrects every guide and every piece of automated output.

1. Source hierarchy

Every claim in our learning content is sourced against the following hierarchy, in order of preference:

Primary style manuals — Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), MLA Handbook (9th ed.), The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.), The ACS Style Guide, AMA Manual of Style (11th ed.), IEEE Editorial Style Manual, and equivalents.
Official publisher style centres — apastyle.apa.org, style.mla.org, chicagomanualofstyle.org, and the equivalent society publications.
Indexed academic sources — methodological articles indexed in Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, or Semantic Scholar.
Open citation infrastructure — the Citation Style Language project (citationstyles.org) for canonical formatting rules.

2. Citation generation accuracy

Citation output produced by CiteGenie is not written by an LLM. Bibliographic fields are pulled from the authoritative source (Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, arXiv, Open Library, WorldCat), and formatting is then performed by the open-source CSL processor against the canonical style file maintained by the CSL project. This means our APA-7 output, for example, matches Zotero's APA-7 output byte-for-byte in the typical case.

3. Source-finding accuracy

Our Find-a-Source tool returns only real, indexed papers. The model selects candidates from results returned by Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and arXiv; it cannot invent identifiers. Every paper card includes a clickable DOI or arXiv ID you can verify against the original publisher.

4. Citation Checker

The Citation Checker performs a hard lookup against Crossref and Semantic Scholar before issuing a verdict. If a DOI is provided we verify it directly; if only metadata is provided we resolve the work and compare the returned title, author list, year, and venue against the user-supplied citation.

5. Editorial review

Every published guide is reviewed by a named editor (see our editorial team) before publication. Reviews verify:

That cited rules match the most recent edition of the primary style manual.
That worked examples have been independently re-run through the citation generator.
That any factual claim about scholarly publishing practice is backed by an indexed source.

6. Updates & freshness

Each guide carries a last updated date in its byline. When a style manual issues a substantive revision (e.g., the move from APA 6 to APA 7, or MLA 8 to MLA 9), every affected page is reviewed within 30 days. Minor copy edits are also reflected in the page's dateModified metadata so search engines surface the freshest version.

7. Corrections policy

If you find an error in a guide or in citation output, email contact@citegenie.app with the URL and the issue. Verified errors are corrected within 5 business days and we add a dated correction note at the bottom of the affected page.

8. Editorial independence

CiteGenie does not accept paid placements in guides. We do not promote products in editorial content beyond CiteGenie's own tools. We do link to free open-source resources (Zotero, the CSL project) where they directly help readers.