Institutional access

Information for universities, academic teams, publishers and organisations exploring Ref-Check for referencing support and human-led review.

Purpose of institutional access

Ref-Check gives staff, students and professional teams a structured way to examine citation–reference matching, investigate scholarly source details and identify potential referencing issues. The aim is to support more consistent, transparent checking while keeping academic and editorial judgement with people.

Institutional access can be explored in a way that reflects local referencing guidance, teaching practices, review workflows and information-governance expectations.

What Ref-Check can support

Three complementary capabilities can be used independently or together, depending on the work being reviewed.

Check citations and references

Identify missing or unmatched citations, review reference-list entries and use available scholarly metadata to investigate source details.

Review in-text citation formatting

See potential formatting issues in recognised author–date citations, with guidance informed by the selected referencing style. Findings remain suggestions for human review, not definitive style judgements.

Share for Feedback

Document owners can invite tutors, supervisors, colleagues or reviewers to examine shared work and Ref-Check findings, highlight passages and leave comments without editing the original document.

Typical use cases

programme-level referencing support for taught courses and student cohorts
academic skills, library support and formative checking during drafting
tutor–student and supervisor–researcher feedback on specific passages or findings
teaching teams discussing recurring citation or referencing issues
supporting moderation and quality-review conversations, without automating assessment decisions
editorial screening and invited peer-review feedback on manuscripts, subject to journal policies and permissions

How institutional access works

Institutional access to Ref-Check is discussed collaboratively and tailored to local needs. There is no single prescribed model.

Arrangements may include staff-only use, defined student cohorts, or a combination of both. Teams can start with a specific teaching or review use case before considering wider use.

Pilots and evaluation

Ref-Check supports pilot discussions for institutions that wish to explore suitability before wider adoption.

A pilot can be scoped around a defined user group, timeframe and purpose. This provides an opportunity to examine usability, the usefulness of findings, feedback workflows and fit with local guidance, without implying a long-term commitment.

Governance, permissions and assurance

Information governance, transparency and accessibility are central to Ref-Check’s approach. Ref-Check does not use generative AI or machine-learning models to analyse uploaded work, and documents are not used to train AI models. Checks use structured, rule-based processes.

Sharing is optional and initiated by the document owner. Before inviting others to review student work, confidential material or unpublished manuscripts, users and institutions should confirm that they have appropriate permission and that sharing complies with local policies. Ref-Check supports human review; it does not replace formal assessment, moderation or journal peer-review management systems.

Further information is available here:

Support and engagement

Ref-Check is designed to be straightforward to use without extensive onboarding. We welcome conversations with teaching teams, academic skills services, libraries, research groups and editorial teams about appropriate use cases.

Where helpful, we can discuss an evaluation approach and use feedback from early institutional users to inform future improvements. Any local technical or workflow requirements can be considered as part of those discussions.

Pricing and access models

Institutional pricing depends on the intended users, scale and type of access. Cohort, staff and usage-based arrangements can be discussed rather than assuming that every organisation needs the same licence model. See Access & pricing or contact us to discuss your requirements.

Getting in touch

If you would like to explore institutional access, a pilot, or a particular academic or editorial workflow, please contact us. A short outline of your setting and intended use is a helpful starting point.

Contact: info@ref-check.co.uk