Terms of service

Who we are

Citation Check is operated by Keywordee, a sole proprietorship registered in British Columbia, registered at Burnaby, British Columbia in Canada. In this document, we and us mean that company, and you means the person or organisation using the service.

By creating an account or using the service, you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an employer or an institution, you confirm you have the authority to do so.

What Citation Check does

You give us a draft. We identify the factual claims in it, look for sources that address each claim, read those sources, and report whether each one supports the claim, along with the passage we relied on. You can then accept a source, replace it, soften a claim, or leave it alone, and export a document with citations and a reference list.

The service reads pages on the public web on your behalf and uses automated language models to judge whether a page supports a claim. It does not write your document for you and it does not make editorial decisions for you.

Who can use it

You must be at least 13 years old to use Citation Check. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may only use it with the permission of a parent or guardian, and they accept these terms with you.

You must not use the service if you are barred from doing so under the laws that apply to you, and you must use it in a way that complies with those laws.

Your account

• Give accurate information when you sign up, and keep it current.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done by people you give access to.
• Keep your sign-in details to yourself. Tell us at info@citationcheck.ai if you think someone else has access.
• Accounts are for a named person. Sharing one account across a team is not permitted unless your plan says otherwise.

Plans, billing and refunds

Citation Check is free today. There is no paid plan, nothing to subscribe to, and we do not take payment or hold card details. Scanning is limited to 5 free scans, or 15 with an account and 10,000 words per scan, so the service stays usable for everyone.

When paid plans arrive we will publish the prices, the billing cycle and the refund terms here before anyone is charged, and we will not start charging for something you are already using for free without telling you first.

Your content, and who owns it

Your documents remain yours. Uploading a draft gives us no ownership of it and no right to publish it.

You grant us a limited licence to store, process, transmit and display your content, and to send the parts we need to the service providers who run the product for us, purely so we can run the service for you. The licence lasts only as long as we need it for that purpose.

You confirm you have the right to submit what you submit, and that doing so does not breach anyone else’s copyright, confidentiality, or privacy.

What we do with your text

To check a claim we send the claim and the text of the candidate pages we fetched to an automated language model. What we send, why, and to whom is set out in the privacy policy.

We may use the content you submit, and what you do with the results we show you, to operate, develop and improve our products and services. We do not sell your content and we do not publish it. We will not go further than that without asking you first and giving you a way to say no.

Verification results are evidence, not proof

The service can be wrong in both directions. It can mark a well-supported claim as unsupported, usually because it could not read the page, the page changed, or the support was worded differently from the claim. It can also mark a claim as supported on the strength of a source that a careful editor would reject.

Results can differ between runs on the same document. Sources move, disappear, and get edited after we read them. The service reads a limited number of candidate pages per claim rather than every page that exists.

You are responsible for what you publish. Check the quoted passage and the source before you rely on a result.

Decisions about people

You must not use a result from this service as the sole basis for accusing, disciplining, grading, penalising, rejecting, or dismissing anyone. A result is one input into a decision a person makes, and the person making that decision has to look at the underlying source.

If you use the service in teaching, editing, hiring, or reviewing, tell the people affected that an automated tool is part of the process, and give them a way to respond to a result they think is wrong.

Acceptable use

The acceptable use policy forms part of these terms. In short, do not use the service to break the law, to misrepresent what it told you, to overwhelm it, to reverse engineer it, or to help someone pass off work as verified when it was not.

Sources and third-party services

The service reads pages published by other people. We do not control those pages, we do not endorse them, and we are not responsible for what they say or for what happens to them after we read them. Links and quotes we surface are there so you can check them yourself.

Some sites restrict automated access. Where a site refuses us, we tell you rather than working around the restriction, and you may need to open or upload the page yourself.

Our intellectual property

The service, its interface, and everything we publish about it remain ours. These terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while your account is in good standing, and nothing more.

Feedback

If you send us a suggestion, we may use it without owing you anything for it. You keep the right to use your own idea however you like.

Changes, availability and beta features

We change the service as we improve it, and we may add, alter, or withdraw features. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and parts of the service will be down at times for maintenance or for reasons outside our control.

Features labelled beta, preview, or early access are exactly that. They may be incomplete, they may change substantially, and they may be withdrawn. Do not depend on them for anything that matters.

Suspension and termination

You can close your account at any time. We can suspend or close an account that breaches these terms or the acceptable use policy, that puts the service or other users at risk, or that we are required to act on by law. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

On termination, your right to use the service ends. We handle what happens to your data as set out in the privacy policy.

Disclaimers

The service is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will find every relevant source, catch every unsupported claim, identify every retraction, or produce the same result twice, and we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or reputational harm, however caused.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to the service is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or CAD $100.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

Indemnity

You agree to cover our reasonable costs if a third party brings a claim against us because of your use of the service, your content, or your breach of these terms.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia and the federal laws of Canada that apply in it, and the courts of British Columbia have exclusive jurisdiction. Talk to us first at info@citationcheck.ai. Most disagreements are quicker to settle in an email than anywhere else.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms as the service changes. When a change matters, we will say so on this page and, if you have an account, by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version.

Contact

Keywordee, a sole proprietorship registered in British Columbia, Burnaby, British Columbia. Email info@citationcheck.ai, or see the contact page for the rest of our addresses. The service lives at citationcheck.ai.