Everything RefScout checks before you submit
Seven focused tools for the last mile of a CS/ML paper — finding real sources, cleaning up your bibliography and LaTeX, and catching the submission mistakes that get papers desk-rejected. No AI-invented references.
Scout
Multi-source literature search across ten live scholarly databases.
- Searches ten live databases in parallel — Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, arXiv, Europe PMC, DBLP, DOAJ, HAL, IETF and CORE — and merges the results.
- De-duplicates the same paper found across sources, and shows exactly which databases returned each result.
- Every result is a real record from those databases — Scout never invents references.
- Verify any result's DOI against CrossRef on demand with a per-result Verify button.
- Copy a BibTeX entry for any paper, or save papers to your Library.
Cite
Paste your text, get real candidate sources for each claim, export a .bib.
- Detects the sentences in your text that need citation support.
- Each claim gets real candidate sources from live scholarly databases — topical matches to review, not a guarantee that a source supports a specific claim.
- Export the sources you keep as a .bib file.
- Copy citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, or IEEE format.
BibCheck
Check your .bib and citations against your manuscript and live databases.
- Flags duplicate keys and matching titles, broken cite keys, and missing references.
- Missing/orphan-citation checks against your manuscript text: entries you never cite, and citations with no .bib entry.
- Optional Verify — checks each entry against live scholarly databases (adds roughly a second per reference; about a minute for a large bibliography).
- Retraction detection — flags a cited work that CrossRef reports as retracted.
- Free, no sign-up needed — daily limits apply for fair use.
PreSubmit
Venue-compliance and submission-readiness checks for PDF, DOCX, or LaTeX. PreSubmit and Full Check are the same engine, two entry points: PreSubmit is the control-first view (pick a venue, toggle individual checks, inspect each result); Full Check is the one-button view (below).
- Structural checks — document structure, sections, plus ORCID/DOI sanity checks.
- Anonymity / double-blind heuristics (a heuristic aid, not a compliance guarantee).
- Page and abstract limit checks driven by the selected venue profile.
- Leftover-template-text detection — lorem-ipsum, placeholder author/title, and stray
\todonotes. \ref/\labelintegrity — orphan references and duplicate labels.- NeurIPS-style checklist assistant (opt-in, AI, beta) that cross-checks your answers against the manuscript.
- Venue-specific profiles — IEEE, ACM, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL — or paste a requirements URL or text.
Glossary
Detect LaTeX abbreviations and generate \newacronym + \gls{} output.
- Detects abbreviations in your .tex text and generates
\newacronymdefinitions with\gls{}wrapping. - Optional domain hint (e.g. "wireless communications") to disambiguate expansions.
- Paste an existing glossary file — already-defined abbreviations are skipped.
- Candidate expansions come from academic papers and Wikipedia with source evidence — never fabricated.
- Free, no sign-up needed — daily limits apply for fair use.
DiffChecker
Compare two versions of a LaTeX document side-by-side.
- Side-by-side line-by-line summary: removed, modified, and added lines.
- Word-level highlighting — only the actually changed spans are marked in modified lines, not the whole line.
- Export the modified version as .txt or copy it with Copy modified.
- Free, no sign-up needed.
Library
Save, tag, browse, and export the papers you find — free, but the only tool that needs an account (so your library persists).
- Save papers you find across RefScout with one click.
- Organize with tags, notes, reading status, and ratings.
- Import an existing BibTeX file into your library.
- Export in BibTeX, APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, or IEEE format.
Full Check
Free during betaFull Check runs PreSubmit, BibCheck (including live retraction detection), and Glossary together in a single pass and rolls the results up into one submission-readiness score — the whole picture before you submit, with zero setup. Because it runs every check against live databases, a large document can take up to a minute or two; Full Check shows live per-stage progress while it works, so you're never left guessing.
- Same engine as PreSubmit, not a separate tool — the one-button entry point (no venue picking, no toggles), calling the exact same checks. Use PreSubmit when you want control; Full Check when you want one score.
- Optional separate
.bibpaste — use it when your references don't extract as BibTeX from the document (common with PDFs), so the duplicate / orphan / live-verify & retraction checks still run. Handles large bibliographies (hundreds of entries). - Prior-publication heads-up (informational) — a best-effort check that flags when a paper with the same title already appears published, so you can confirm it's an intended prior version rather than an accidental dual submission.
- Optional existing-glossary paste — abbreviations already defined there are skipped, so they aren't reported as undefined.
- NeurIPS-style checklist cross-check (opt-in, AI, beta) — shown only for NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML-family venues, cross-checking your answers against the manuscript.
- Free during beta — a paid feature by design, free while in beta; nothing ships silently paid.