Definition
Plain language
A free, open database of the world's scholarly papers and how they cite each other.
As stated in the literature
An open bibliographic catalog of works, authors, venues, and citations; one of the six databases RefChecker queries to confirm whether a cited reference is real.
Why it matters: It gives an open, wide-ranging map of published work and citations that anyone can use to verify references for free.
For example, a checker can query OpenAlex to see whether a cited paper — and its listed authors — actually appear in the scholarly record.
Heard on the show
“Stage two: check each reference against six big bibliographic catalogs — Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, DBLP, the ACL Anthology, and direct identifier lookups like DOIs and arXiv.”Episode 201 — One in Four NeurIPS Papers Cites a Reference That Doesn't Exist