SourceLens
A research-writing assistant for students and journalists that pastes in your draft (or your sources list) and produces a source-quality report, highlighting which claims rest on weak provenance and suggesting stronger swaps.
undergraduate and postgraduate students writing research papers, and freelance journalists verifying claims
- Paste a draft, get a per-claim source-quality report (credible, weak, unverified)
- Inline highlights flagging claims that rest only on low-grade sources
- 'Find me a better source' suggests a stronger citation to swap in
- Discipline-aware scoring: knows what counts as authoritative in psychology vs. economics vs. CS
Source-credibility scoring is the missing layer in every AI research tool students already use; the paper proves a simple prior delivers measurable gains.
Elicit alone claims 2M+ researchers and 500+ news orgs use AI verification tools (Nieman 2024), confirming real pull — but demand is for a layer within larger research stacks, not a standalone report.Pricing | Elicit: The AI Research Assistant ↗AI Fact-Checking Tools for Journalists ↗
Crowded: Citely.ai, CiteMe, TrueCitation, and sourceverify.ai already market themselves as AI citation/source checkers; Elicit, Consensus and Scite all surface source-quality signals, so the 'missing layer' framing is overstated.AI Citation Checker & Source Finder — Citely ↗TrueCitation: Verify Citations, Sources & Bibliographies ↗
Elicit's Plus tier at ~$11/mo with 40% student discounts and Pro at $49/mo shows WTP exists, but student-heavy target audience is price-sensitive and the verification niche is becoming a free/commoditized feature inside bigger suites.Pricing - Consensus ↗Elicit Pricing 2026 ↗
AI hallucination/fabricated-citation problem is worsening (Citely, TrueCitation all lean on this), and journalism verification is structurally growing — but incumbents will absorb source-quality scoring as a feature, capping standalone moat.Best AI Fact-Checking Tools to Trust in 2025 ↗Citely Academic Source Verification ↗
Doable with CrossRef/Semantic Scholar/OpenAlex APIs plus an LLM (several competitors already ship it), but matching citations to claims, handling paywalled sources, and detecting predatory journals add real engineering and data costs.sourceverify.ai ↗Citation Checker — CiteMe ↗