Source audit
Every citation found. Every quote traced to its page.
AI-assisted research produces sources that look real and quotes nobody said. I check every reference, quote and cited claim in your book or report against the source itself, then sign the report. Fixed price, ten business days.
Five citations, checked by hand, back in 48 hours.
Why now
The inventing got faster. The checking didn’t.
5 of 45
citations in KPMG’s agentic AI report pointed to real, intact sources. The firm withdrew the report in June 2026.
Technology.org, June 2026A$97,000
refunded by Deloitte to the Australian government for a report with nonexistent references and an invented court quote.
CFO Dive, October 2025$7,000+
is what an outside fact-check of a nonfiction book costs, often up to $10,000. Publishers aren’t contractually obliged to pay for it, so it falls to the author.
New York Magazine, via beSpacific, May 2026Checking that a reference exists is free now; plenty of tools do it. Checking that the source says what your sentence claims means reading it. That part is still human work, and it’s the part I sell.
What gets checked
Four questions for every citation.
01
Does the source exist?
Author, title, year, publisher, DOI or ISBN, matched against the actual record, not a search snippet.
02
Is the quote verbatim?
Word for word against the original, with the page number. Paraphrases that read like quotes get flagged.
03
Does the source support the claim?
I read the cited passage and check that it says what your sentence says it says.
04
What couldn’t be verified?
Print-only books, paywalled papers, interviews. Listed as open, with what I need from you. Never guessed.
What it isn’t: a full fact-check of every statement, a legal review or an AI-detection score. It covers exactly what your citations and quotes promise.
The report
One line per citation. A verdict you can act on.
Source audit · Report
The Long Middle
Manuscript v3 · 214 citations · 38 direct quotes
Signed
Jürgen Pretsch
Delivered on day 9
- 188Verified
- 14Mismatch
- 5Not found
- 7Open
| # | Citation as written | Verdict | Finding |
|---|---|---|---|
| 017 | Hartmann, L. & Ruiz, P. (2019). Trust after restructuring. Journal of Workplace Studies, 12(3), 41-58. p. 44 | Verified | Quote on p. 44 matches word for word. |
| 052 | Okafor, N. (2021). Remote work and the retention gap. Management Quarterly. | Mismatch | Real article, published 2020. The 23% figure isn’t in it; it comes from a 2022 industry survey the article doesn’t cite. Corrected reference attached. |
| 088 | Lindqvist, M. (2023). The Quiet Ledger. Northbridge University Press. | Not found | No record at the publisher, in WorldCat or at the Library of Congress. The author has published no book by this title. Likely invented: cut or replace. |
| 131 | Interview with a former plant manager, March 2024. | Open | Not verifiable from public sources. Send the transcript or your notes and I’ll check the quote. |
Illustrative excerpt. Invented manuscript, invented references.
You get the report as a PDF, plus a corrected reference list you can paste straight back into the manuscript. One re-check of your fixes is included.
Who it’s for
Three ways in.
Authors
My book is going to the editor, or back to print.
Nonfiction on business, psychology, health or tech. The report stays between us. Fix what it finds before anyone else finds it.
Ghostwriters & agencies
I’m about to hand over a manuscript.
White-label report under your name, at trade pricing. I never contact your clients, and that’s in writing.
Reports
Our report goes public next week.
Consultancies, think tanks, nonprofits and agencies. One report, or a standing audit for everything you publish.
Price
Fixed, by the number of citations and quotes.
Spot check
Five citations you pick, back in 48 hours
Free
Report
Up to 75 citations and quotes
$750
Long report or short book
Up to 200
$1,500
Book
Up to 400, a typical nonfiction book
$2,900
Larger
Over 400
Quoted in one business day
Standing audit
Everything a team publishes, every month
From $1,500 / month
Ten business days, or five with express (+50%). One re-check of your corrections included. Ghostwriters and agencies: 20% trade discount and a white-label report.
How AI is used here
Software does the lookup. I do the reading.
Tooling matches every reference against Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, the German National Library and publisher catalogues, and pulls the source text wherever it’s open.
Clean matches are confirmed by the tooling and spot-checked by me. Every flag, every quote and every claim check is read by me. The report marks which verdicts came from which.
Who’s checking
A psychologist who writes books for a living.
Fourteen years of ghostwriting, including more than fifty nonfiction books on management, psychology and health, every one with sources that had to hold. Before that, years running government-funded research projects in Austria, where a citation was an obligation, not a decoration.
Questions
Is this a fact-check?
No. A fact-check verifies every statement in the text. This verifies what your citations and quotes promise, which is exactly where AI-assisted research breaks. The scope is narrower, so the price is too.
Who sees my manuscript?
Only me. NDA on request. Files are deleted 30 days after delivery and never used to train anything.
What about paywalled and print-only sources?
I get at what I can through library and publisher access. Anything I can’t reach is marked open, with what I need from you. I never guess.
German sources?
Yes, natively. Manuscripts in English or German.
What if the report comes back clean?
Then you have a signed record that every source was checked. Hand it to your editor, your client or your board.
Do you check whether the text was written by AI?
No. Detection scores are unreliable and beside the point. What matters is whether the sources hold.
Free spot check
Send five citations. See what comes back.
Pick the five you’re least sure about. Paste each one with the sentence it supports. You get the verdicts within 48 hours, checked by hand, no obligation.