Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and DocumentMind LLC, registered in Cheyenne, Wyoming, United States, which operates CiteTrue. Creating an account or using the service means you accept them. If you are using CiteTrue on behalf of an institution, you are confirming you may bind that institution.

The Privacy Policy at /privacy forms part of this agreement. Where the two documents overlap — deletion, retention, what happens to your uploads — they are written to say the same thing.

CiteTrue takes the references in a piece of writing and checks them against scholarly databases and the open web: does this work exist, are the author and year right, does the source say what the citing text claims. You get a per-reference result with the evidence behind it.

It is available through the website, a browser extension, a macOS app, an HTTP API and an MCP server. All of them are the same service under these terms.

CiteTrue is a tool for finding problems, not an authority that certifies their absence. A clean result is evidence that we could not find a problem, not proof that none exists — coverage of the underlying databases is uneven, metadata is often wrong at the source, and reference formats vary wildly.

It is not a plagiarism checker, not a peer-review substitute, and not professional, academic or legal advice. Responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of your work stays with you. If a verification result is going to matter — a submission, a grade, an accusation of misconduct — check the underlying source yourself.

You need an account to verify anything. Keep your credentials and API keys to yourself — activity under your account is treated as yours, and API keys carry the same weight as a password.

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 18, you confirm a parent or guardian agrees to these terms on your behalf. One account per person, unless we have agreed otherwise in writing for an institution or team.

The Acceptable Use Policy at /acceptable-use is part of this agreement, and it is short enough to actually read. In outline: use CiteTrue to check references — yours or those in work you supervise, review or assess — and do not use it to launder fabricated work, resell verification as your own service, or get around what you are paying for.

It also asks something of you that is not really a legal obligation but matters more than most of them: a reference we could not verify is a question to ask, not proof of misconduct. Check the source before you act on a finding.

Verification consumes credits. Every account gets a free daily allowance; paid plans add a monthly allowance, and credit packs can be bought on top of either.

Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel. You can cancel any time from /dashboard/billing; cancelling stops the next renewal and you keep everything you paid for until the end of the current period.

We do not automatically refund part-used periods. If something has gone genuinely wrong — you were charged twice, or the service did not work for you — write to us and we will sort it out; we would rather refund you than argue about it.

Everything you upload stays yours. You give us only the permission needed to run the service on it: to store it, extract its references, check them, and show you the result. Nothing broader — see /privacy for exactly where your text goes.

The service itself — the interface, the verification pipeline, the models and prompts behind it, the CiteTrue name and logo — stays ours. Reports we generate are yours to use in your own work; the service that generated them is not yours to resell.

API and MCP access is subject to the same credits and the same acceptable use as the interface. Keep within the documented rate limits; if you need more, ask rather than working around them.

We may change API endpoints as the service evolves. Breaking changes get advance notice through the documentation and, for accounts using the affected endpoint, by email.

We aim to keep CiteTrue running, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance happens, and the scholarly databases and model providers we depend on have outages of their own — when Crossref or a model provider is down, some verifications will fail or degrade until it returns.

We may add, change or remove features. If a change materially reduces what you are paying for, we will tell you before it takes effect.

You can stop at any time: cancel your subscription, or delete your account outright from /dashboard. Deletion is immediate and permanent — export anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend or close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, for fraud or chargeback abuse, or where we are legally required to. If we close a paid account that has not broken these terms, we will refund the unused part of the current period.

The service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we do not warrant that results will be complete or error-free.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including academic, professional or reputational consequences of relying on a verification result, or for loss of data you did not keep a copy of. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose, or 100 USD, whichever is greater.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded, and if you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used the service — material you had no right to upload, academic misconduct carried out with it, or a breach of these terms — you agree to cover the resulting costs.

We may update these terms. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and material changes are announced by email at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use CiteTrue after that means you accept the new version; if you do not, cancel and stop using it.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction — except that either of us may seek injunctive relief in any competent court. Nothing here removes protections you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in.

Before anyone involves a court: write to us. Almost everything that reaches this section is a billing mistake or a misunderstanding about what a verification result means, and both are faster to fix by email.

If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest survives. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business.

Together with the Privacy Policy at /privacy, this is the entire agreement between us about the service.

Questions about these terms, a refund, or anything else: [email protected]. Tell us what happened and we will answer.