Tools Academic Reviewer
Academic Reviewer

Academic text reviewer that corrects your writing and checks your citations

Paste your article, thesis chapter, or paper section and get grammar corrections, clarity suggestions, and your author and year citations checked against your own Zotero library.

Version
2026.08
Last updated
Available since
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What this solves

The Academic Reviewer reads the text you paste and returns grammar corrections, clarity and style suggestions, citation problems, and the points that already work. Corrections, style suggestions, and citation problems each point at the exact excerpt they refer to. If you connect Zotero, it also extracts the citations in your text and tells you which ones it found in your library.

How it works

  1. Paste your text

    Open the reviewer and paste your text. The review runs on its own about two seconds after you stop typing, and each completed run consumes 10 credits.

  2. Read the findings

    Open the Corrections and Suggestions tabs. Correction and style items show the original excerpt, the proposed wording, and the reason behind it, so you decide what to accept; general suggestions and strong points come as short notes.

  3. Check and add citations

    Connect Zotero to see which citations exist in your library, or search academic domains on the web and insert the ones you choose.

Method

What happens to your file, step by step, and where the result stops being a decision made by a model.

How it works inside

Text is pasted into a browser editor (no file upload on this screen). Three separately priced operations run on it. The review sends the text to OpenAI gpt-4o at temperature 0.1, streams the reply to the page as it is generated, and parses it into a fixed six-key JSON schema. Citation extraction is regex only, with one pattern per standard (ABNT, APA, Vancouver). Zotero validation queries api.zotero.org with author plus year and marks a citation valid only when the item date contains that year and a creator surname matches.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

A language model writes every review finding: gpt-4o produces the grammar, style and citation-problem lists and nothing re-checks them. Keyword extraction and the 0 to 10 relevance score given to each Zotero item are also model output. Deterministic: the citation regex, the Zotero year plus surname match, CrossRef author metadata (which overwrites model-supplied authors), the minimum-field filter, and the word-preservation check applied to citation insertion.

What it accepts

  • Plain text pasted into the editor. The review needs at least 10 characters; Zotero suggestions and web search need at least 50. No DOCX or PDF is read by this tool.
  • Citation standard: the service accepts ABNT, APA or Vancouver, but the screen offers no selector, so every review runs against ABNT.
  • Zotero credentials: numeric user ID plus API key, and an optional collection key, read from the account integration or from the request. Without them every citation comes back marked as not validated.
  • Web search: one of six knowledge areas (multidisciplinary, health, engineering, social sciences, exact sciences, biological sciences), each with its own list of academic domains. The screen always asks for 12 web results and 10 Zotero suggestions; the service accepts 1 to 15 and 1 to 12.

What you get back

  • Review JSON with six fixed keys (grammar corrections, style improvements, citation problems, general suggestions, strong points, summary). If the reply is not parseable JSON, the raw text is placed in the general suggestions field.
  • Citation list with the Zotero status of each one, plus counts of words, characters, citations found and citations validated.
  • Suggested references with a 0 to 10 score, a reason to cite (capped at 150 characters for library suggestions, 200 for web results), an inline "(Author, Year)" and the excerpt where the citation would fit; web results also carry full ABNT and APA reference strings.
  • Text with the selected citations inserted (the reply notes whether the model or the fixed rule placed them, and this step charges no credits), DOCX and PDF downloads of the text, and web results saved into your Zotero library as journal article items.
  • Per-user search history (Zotero and web), shown in pages. Deleted entries are hidden from the list, not erased from the database.

What this tool does not do

  • It does not confirm that a citation found on the web exists. CrossRef is consulted by DOI, or by title with a 0.75 similarity cut, and only corrects the authors; when there is no match the model's own metadata stays. Items without a title, URL, four-digit year or usable authors are discarded.
  • It does not read the whole of a long text for citation work. Long input is sampled into excerpts of at most 12000 characters (10000 for keyword extraction, 5000 for relevance scoring), so parts of a long document are seen only as samples.
  • Zotero validation is a string match, not bibliographic verification: an item whose date contains the year and whose surname matches counts as valid. Numeric Vancouver citations such as [12] are never picked up by the citation check, so they always need a manual look.
  • It does not rewrite your text. The review returns suggestions; the citation insertion step only adds parenthetical citations, and any answer that changes a single word is discarded in favour of the fixed insertion rule.
  • It does not judge whether a source deserves to be cited. The 0 to 10 relevance is a model opinion; library suggestions scoring below 5.0 are dropped (when nothing clears the bar, a single item scoring at least 3.0 is returned anyway), and web results are only sorted by their score, never dropped by it.
Plan
Starter
Cost
10 credits

What you get

  • Every comment points at an excerpt

    Grammar corrections, clarity edits, and citation problems come tied to the passage that triggered them, never as generic advice about your writing.

  • Citations checked against your library

    With Zotero connected, each author and year citation is searched in your library. You see what was found, what has a different year, and what is missing.

  • Suggestions with a source

    Citation suggestions come from your own Zotero library or from a web search that the AI is instructed to keep within academic domains in the area you pick, each with a reason to cite.

  • Your wording stays yours

    When you insert a selected citation, the text is not rewritten. If the model does not return your original wording intact, the insertion falls back to a fixed rule.

Changelog

Every line below is a change that actually shipped, dated by the day it went out.

  1. Latest
    • The insufficient-credit notice was showing a cost lower than what the review actually charges, and now shows the real one.
Show 5 earlier updates
    • Zotero is now connected only under Integrations in My Account, and the reviewer uses that connection.
    • Opening the reviewer requires an active plan or trial: credit balance alone no longer unlocks the page.
    • Zotero suggestions now point to the exact sentence where each citation belongs in your text.
    • The AI inserts the selected citations into the text and merges them, for example (A, 2023; B, 2024).
    • Clicking a reference highlights its citation in the text, and clicking the citation highlights the reference.
    • Citations sent to Zotero are matched by DOI first, so the same work stops being saved twice.
    • Citation explanations, both from Zotero and from the web, are written in the language you use.
    • The reviewer's interface and messages are available in English, not only in Portuguese.
    • The page reports the status of your trial, including when it has already expired.
    • Web citation search arrived: choose your field of knowledge and get citations found online.
    • Author names are completed with CrossRef data, matched by DOI and title, for more accurate references.
    • The Zotero window was redesigned with connection status, connect and disconnect, and the choice of collection.
    • Your citation searches are now kept in a history you can revisit.
    • Credits are consumed only after the review finishes: an analysis that fails no longer charges you.

Questions and answers

Does it replace my own review or my advisor's?

No. It flags excerpts and explains what could change, but decisions about argument, method, and meaning are yours. The suggestions come from a language model and can be wrong, so read each one before accepting.

Can I upload a PDF or Word file?

Not in this tool. The reviewer works with text you paste or type into the editor. To audit a finished PDF or DOCX against its reference list, use the Reference Checker instead.

Is my text used to train AI models?

Your text is sent to the AI provider's API so the review can be generated. We use the paid API tiers, whose published policy states that content sent this way is not used to train models.

Which citation formats does it read?

It reads author and year citations such as (Silva, 2020), and the review is written against ABNT conventions. Numeric citations such as [12] are not extracted or checked in Zotero, so they need a manual look.

How to cite this tool

Used it in your research? Here is the reference, already filled in with the version you are looking at and today's access date.

ABNT (NBR 6023)

LESSA, P. W. B. Academic Reviewer. Versão 2026.08. [S. l.]: Xplore Dados, 2026. Disponível em: https://xploredados.com/en/tool/academic-reviewer. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2026.

APA 7

Lessa, P. W. B. (2026). Academic Reviewer (Version 2026.08) [Computer software]. Xplore Dados. https://xploredados.com/en/tool/academic-reviewer

BibTeX

@software{xploredados_academic_reviewer_2026,
  author  = {Lessa, Patrick Wendell Barbosa},
  title   = {Academic Reviewer},
  organization = {Xplore Dados},
  version = {2026.08},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://xploredados.com/en/tool/academic-reviewer},
  urldate = {2026-08-21}
}

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