Check the citations in a whole document

Open a Word (.docx) or PDF file, or paste the text with its footnotes after it, and Citation Coach checks every citation it finds — in the body and in the footnotes — the same way it checks one citation or a list. Each is reported as correct, as needing correction (with the corrected form, what changed, and the rule), or as something it could not check, with the reason.

Your document stays on your computer

The file is read by your browser. It is not uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and the check runs on your machine.

What it checks

• Footnotes, in order. Id., supra and case short forms are checked against the footnotes before them, as in a law review.
• Citations in the text. Citation sentences and citations inside sentences of text are found and checked one by one.
• Short forms across the text and the notes. In a memo or brief, an id. refers to the citation just before it in the document, whether that is in the text or a footnote.
• Typeface. Where the file keeps its formatting, a case name or signal that should be in italics, and is not, is reported.
• Anything it could not read. Text that looks like a citation but was not recognized is listed, never skipped; a scanned PDF page with no text on it is reported as unread.

It guesses whether the document is a memo or brief (Bluepages) or a law review piece (Whitepages) from where its citations sit, shows the guess, and lets you change it.

Older Word files (.doc) are not read: save them as .docx first. Scanned PDFs need text recognition (OCR) before they can be checked.