Citation Gap Finder

About

Catch the citation errors in your thesis before your supervisor does.

Citation Gap Finder is a Chrome extension built for graduate students,
post-docs, and academic researchers who can't afford to ship sloppy
references. In 30 seconds, it cross-checks every citation in your
Google Docs or Overleaf document against your reference list and
produces a structured report of:

  • Orphan citations — cited in your text but missing from your
    reference list (the most common reason for desk rejection)
  • Unused references — listed in your bibliography but never
    actually cited in the body
  • Broken DOIs — malformed identifiers, placeholder strings like
    "doi: pending", or anything else that won't resolve

Supports five citation styles out of the box: Vancouver, APA, Harvard,
Chicago footnote, and IEEE. Auto-detects the style for most documents;
asks you to pick when ambiguous.

Privacy-first by design:
  • Zero AI runtime — every check is deterministic regex parsing,
    not a language model on a remote server
  • Your document is never sent to our servers or any third party
  • For Google Docs specifically, we read your text via Google's
    own File → Download → Plain Text endpoint — your data
    round-trips inside Google and never reaches us
  • No cloud upload, no document text retention, no AI training

How it works:
  1. Open your document in Google Docs or Overleaf
  2. Click the Citation Gap Finder icon in your Chrome toolbar
  3. Click Run Check
  4. Read the structured report — fix issues in 20 minutes
     instead of 4 hours

Word for the web support is on the roadmap for v1.1. Word's editor
virtualises pages on demand, which makes reliable end-to-end
extraction from a browser extension hard; we'd rather ship Google
Docs and Overleaf working perfectly than ship Word half-working.

7-day free trial with full functionality. After the trial, $7/month
or $39/year keeps it active. Cancel anytime.

Built by Dr. Rafiq Muhammad, PhD — author of the Mastering Research
book series. Reply to support emails goes to a real person; bug fixes
ship within days.

Not affiliated with Google or Overleaf.