What is being checked
Paste the reference-list entries, not the in-text citations. RefCheck recognizes APA among other styles and pulls out the authors, year, title, and DOI. It then searches Crossref and OpenAlex, and the other databases that fit the work: PubMed and Europe PMC for biomedical items, arXiv for preprints, DBLP for computer science, DataCite for datasets, Open Library and Google Books for books.
If the record agrees, the verdict is real. If a work is found but the year, pages, venue, or DOI disagree, the verdict is real with errors and a corrected citation is shown. You can adopt that correction or keep your own wording. If nothing matches, the verdict is likely fabricated. If the evidence is thin, it stays unconfirmed.
What is not being checked
This is not an APA style linter. It does not score italics, hanging indents, the title-page, the running head, “et al.” thresholds, or whether an in-text citation such as (Chen, 2024) has a matching entry. Those are formatting rules. The failure this page is about is a reference that does not correspond to a published work.
It also does not check that the paper says what your sentence claims. After a match, open the article if the claim is important. Retraction flags, when Crossref (Retraction Watch), PubMed, or Europe PMC have one, are shown separately from the style of the entry.
A practical order of work
Generate or type the APA list, paste it here, and fix every “real with errors” line before you worry about italics. Drop or replace “likely fabricated” lines. Leave “unconfirmed” lines for a manual search, especially books and non-English journals.
If the list was drafted by a chatbot, use the ChatGPT fake references checker as well. The steps are the same; that page is written for lists that came out of a chat. IEEE and Vancouver have their own pages because the entry shape and the databases differ, not because the verdicts do.