My college roommate got called out in front of the whole seminar for one sentence in her paper. Not because it was wrong. Her professor just asked “where’s this from?” and she froze. She genuinely couldn’t remember if she’d read it in a book or made it up during a 2am writing session. A senior history major who posts on Reddit as u/Perfect_Pie8446 hit that same wall enough times to stop trusting their own memory. So they built a prompt that checks for it before a professor ever gets the chance.
The idea is simple: paste your whole paper, footnotes and all, and ask an AI to flag every claim that doesn’t have a citation attached. Not whether the claim is true. Just whether you backed it up. “I know I read that somewhere” is the exact phrase this Redditor learned isn’t a citation. It’s also the phrase that gets circled in red ink.
Why It Matters 📚
Here’s the thing about writing a long paper: by the fifth read-through, you stop seeing your own sentences. Everything blends together, the cited stuff and the stuff you’re pretty sure you read somewhere. That “pretty sure” feeling is exactly what a strict professor is trained to sniff out, and they will find the one line you can’t defend.
This Redditor’s fix works because it separates two questions that usually get tangled up: “is this true” and “is this cited.” An AI checking both at once tends to get generous, since a plausible-sounding claim reads as fine even with zero sources behind it. Splitting the check keeps the model narrow and honest. It’s not fact-checking your paper, it’s auditing your paper trail.
That distinction matters more the longer the paper gets. A five-page essay, you can proofread by memory. A twenty-page thesis chapter with sixty footnotes, you can’t. Your brain starts treating “I remember writing this” as proof the sentence is backed by something. Half the time, it’s backed by nothing but a half-remembered lecture slide.
How To Run The Check 🔍
Before you submit anything, drop your full draft, citations included, into this prompt:
You are checking my paper for unsupported claims. Do not fact-check whether they’re true. Only check whether I cited them.
Here is my paper with its footnotes/citations:
{{paste it}}Go paragraph by paragraph and list:
- Every factual or interpretive claim that has no citation attached.
- For each, quote the exact sentence.
- Rank them by how likely a strict reader is to challenge it (a specific date or figure ranks high, general context ranks lower).
Do not rewrite my paper. Do not add sources you can’t see. Just show me the gaps.
Three things are doing real work here. First, the paragraph-by-paragraph instruction stops the model from skimming and handing you a vague “looks mostly fine” summary. Second, quoting the exact sentence means you can search straight to the problem instead of hunting for it. Third, the ranking step tells you where to spend your last hour before the deadline. A specific date or number is what a strict reader challenges first, not a vague background sentence.
What you get back reads like a short punch list instead of a wall of feedback: a sentence, a citation status, and a risk level. A claim like “the treaty was signed in March of that year” lands near the top. Any reader can look that date up and catch you empty-handed. A sentence like “this shift reflected broader anxieties of the period” lands lower, because it’s the kind of interpretive gloss professors let slide more often. You work top to bottom until the list runs out or the clock does.
Tips And Tricks 🧠
- The “don’t add sources” line is non-negotiable. Drop it and the model will happily invent a plausible-looking citation to fill the gap, which is worse than an honest blank. A fake source that sails past you is a bigger problem than a naked claim you at least know about.
- Run it before your final formatting pass, not after. Fixing citations is way easier when the paragraph is still loose than when you’ve already locked in your page numbers.
- Treat the ranking as a to-do list, not a verdict. High-ranked items get a real source. Low-ranked “general context” claims might just need a softer verb, like “suggests” instead of “proves,” if a source really isn’t out there.
- It won’t grade your sources. The prompt only checks presence, not quality, so a lazy citation still slips through clean. That judgment call is still yours.
- Reuse it per section on longer papers. Dropping a 40-page thesis in one shot works, but running it chapter by chapter keeps the output focused enough to actually act on.
One More Pass Before You Submit ⚓
This is the kind of prompt worth keeping pinned next to your citation manager. If you’ve got a paper due and a nagging feeling that one paragraph is running on vibes, run it before your professor does. Go check out the original thread and see what other students are doing with it.
Here’s a prompt that flags every claim in your paper that doesn’t have a source yet
by u/Perfect_Pie8446 in PromptEngineering