CiteStamp: citation-health check in the item pane (Zotero 8 and up)

CiteStamp · 2026-08-30T14:18:01+00:00

Plugin that checks the health of a reference from inside Zotero. Select an item and it answers three things: does this reference resolve to a real work, is it marked retracted by the publisher (best effort), and does it have recorded refutations in CiteStamp's signed graph. A "weak match" stays a weak match. The plugin never says a paper is true or false, only whether the citation points at something real.

It runs in Zotero's own context, so the resolve lookups go straight from your machine to OpenAlex, Crossref and DataCite. The only thing citestamp.com sees is the bare identifier, for the retraction and refutation lookup; nothing else about your library leaves the machine. If you want to sign your own reference list you can, through ORCID, from a button in the pane.

Free, no account. Zotero 8 or later. Install: download the .xpi from https://citestamp.com/get, then Tools, Plugins, Install Plugin From File. It auto-updates from citestamp.com/zotero/updates.json.

Source: https://github.com/citestamp/zotero-plugin

Happy to hear feedback -> info@citestamp.com

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u21398402/cjoy5aul7q0p49tdvwvj.png

dstillman · 2026-08-30T14:18:37+00:00

(Zotero has had built-in retraction checking for seven years.)

CiteStamp · 2026-08-30T15:45:43+00:00

You're right about retractions. That line comes out of the pane in the next release.

The plugin is for something Zotero does not do: it checks that a reference points at a real paper by looking it up in Crossref, DataCite and OpenAlex; an invented citation fails that check. It shows whether anyone has published a refutation of the paper. And every paper has a page on citestamp.com with an interactive graph you can click through: what it cites, what cites it, what supports or refutes it. The next release opens that graph from the pane.

variable · 2026-08-31T06:45:42+00:00

This plugin is directly related as well. It finds replications (or originals) of many papers https://github.com/forrtproject/flora-zotero

CiteStamp · 2026-08-31T07:03:23+00:00

Thanks, that's a good pointer and closer than related: the replication lines in CiteStamp's pane come from the same FORRT data (FReD/FLoRA), credited on each row. They shipped in 1.0.4 this morning, along with the two changes promised above; the retraction line now appears only when a work is actually flagged, and the pane opens the paper's citation graph.

For working through a whole library, the FORRT Replication Checker is the dedicated tool: batch scans, tags, linked items. And worth installing for that.

What CiteStamp is underneath is different: a public, CC0 citation graph where a paper's page shows what cites it, what it cites, and any recorded replication outcomes, with human-signed claims (ORCID) kept strictly apart from machine-inferred ones. The pane's check answers whether a reference resolves to a real work at all (the invented-citation catch), including deposits the citation databases don't index, like Zenodo. And the same graph answers AI assistants over MCP with no key, so an agent can check a citation before it emits it.