How it works

From reference list to signed record

A reference list is flat text — forty entries, zero information about what any of them actually do. CiteStamp turns each one into a typed, signed, public claim: a name attached, a permanent place on an append-only log that nobody gets to quietly edit. Including us.

The graph has two kinds of edges — and they never mix

Every answer CiteStamp gives carries a tier. Signed edges were put on the record by a named researcher under their ORCID iD, cryptographically signed, appended to a public chained log. Inferred edges come from machine sweeps of open scholarly metadata — useful coverage, clearly labelled as machine work. The two tiers coexist on every paper page, and nothing ever silently promotes one to the other. The signed tier is young — its early claims are largely the founder seeding the mechanism on his own papers, disclosed on each claim page; today’s coverage lives in the inferred tier.

A paper page on the public citation graph: outgoing and incoming claims, each carrying a signed or inferred chip — a real paper page — every claim labelled signed or machine-inferred, never blended

Signing your own citations

Paste a DOI on the main page. The reference list is drafted from open scholarly data (OpenAlex, Zenodo), and you choose what each citation actually does: supports, refutes, extends, uses a method, uses data, or plain cites. Signing happens server-side under your researcher identity — there are no keys to download, manage, or lose. Each signed claim is public, CC0, timestamped, and chained to every claim before it, so the record cannot be quietly edited later.

Claiming a paper that is already in the graph

Machine sweeps have already mapped citations for hundreds of thousands of papers. If one of them is yours, open its page and follow Claim with ORCID. You sign in with your ORCID iD, tick the citations that are genuinely part of your reference list, and sign them under your name. Signing in proves who you are; whether the paper is yours is checked against the work’s own public metadata — and when the metadata doesn’t list your iD, a human curator reviews the claim instead. Nothing is ever auto-approved on a name match.

The claim page for a work already in the graph: the machine-inferred citation claims that list it as their source, above a Sign in with ORCID button — claiming starts here — sign in with ORCID, then tick only what is genuinely yours

Retraction is public too

Signed something in error? A retraction is itself a signed, public event on the same log — the original line stays, the retraction points at it, and every reader sees both. That is what an append-only record means.

Try it now: ask the live graph about any DOI on the main page — no account, no key, ten asks a minute.