Terms of service

Citation Monster reads academic papers you upload, extracts and checks their references, links them to public scholarly records, and lets you chat with papers, run research, take notes and build knowledge bases. Many features use AI models. We may change, add or remove features; we will tell you in advance about changes that take away something you pay for.

• You must be at least 16 and give us accurate information.
• Keep your sign-in details safe. You are responsible for what happens in your account; tell us at support@citationmonster.com if you think someone else has used it.
• Workspace owners decide who joins their workspace and what members can do. Everything in a workspace is visible to its members as their role allows.

You own what you upload and create: papers, notes, highlights, chats, questions, research and knowledge bases (“your content”). You give us only the permission we need to store, process and display it to run the service for you, including sending the parts a task needs to our AI and OCR providers. That permission ends when your content is deleted, apart from backups and the periods described in the Privacy policy.

We do not use your content or your usage to train AI models, and our AI providers are bound not to either. See the Privacy policy.

You confirm you have the right to upload what you upload, for example because it is open access, you wrote it, or your licence allows it, and that it is not unlawful.

Citation Monster downloads, processes and stores publicly available material: metadata from sources such as OpenAlex, Crossref, Unpaywall and Europe PMC, and open-access copies of cited papers. We keep one shared copy that all users' papers can link to. That material remains subject to its original licence and owners; we don't claim it, and you should follow its licence when you reuse it. Your private connection to it (which of your papers cite a work and what you found) stays private.

AI models make mistakes. Extracted references, verification results, summaries, answers and research findings can be wrong or incomplete. Check anything important against the source before you rely on it, cite it or publish it. You are responsible for your own work and how you use the output.

Don't:

• break the law or infringe anyone's rights;
• try to get into other people's workspaces or data, or test our security without written permission (we welcome reports at support@citationmonster.com);
• overload, scrape or reverse engineer the service, or get around its limits;
• upload malware, or content meant to manipulate the AI into harming others;
• use the service to build a competing dataset or to train AI models.

We may suspend or close accounts that break these rules, telling you why unless the law or safety prevents it.

Paid plans are billed in advance through Stripe and renew automatically until you cancel. You can cancel at any time in Settings; the plan runs until the end of the period you paid for. Fees are not refunded except where the law requires. We will give at least 30 days' notice of a price change, which applies from your next renewal. Usage limits for each plan are shown on the pricing page.

You can stop at any time and delete your account in Settings. You can export your workspace first. Deleted workspaces and accounts can be restored for 30 days, then are removed for good, as the Privacy policy describes. We may end the service or your access with reasonable notice, and will give you time to export your data unless you broke these terms.

We work hard to keep Citation Monster accurate, available and secure, but it is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we make no other promises, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose or that it will be error-free or uninterrupted.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, or loss of profits, data or reputation, and our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim (or US$100 if you paid nothing). Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited, or your rights as a consumer.

Nothing in these terms takes away a right the law where you live gives you to bring a dispute there. Please email support@citationmonster.com first; most problems can be fixed quickly.

We may update these terms. We change the date at the top, and tell you by email or in the app at least 30 days before a material change takes effect. If you keep using Citation Monster after that, the new terms apply; if you don't agree, you can delete your account.

Email support@citationmonster.com.