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Open Ibid, choose your manuscript (or drag it onto the window) and click Check Citations. If the manuscript ends with a References, Bibliography or Works Cited section, that’s all: Ibid reads it automatically. You can also add BibTeX, CSL-JSON or RIS files to check against.

To see what it does first, choose Help › Try the Sample: a short essay citing Scott, Foucault, Bourdieu and others, with a few planted mistakes.

Manuscript: Word (.docx), PDF, Markdown, LaTeX (.tex), RTF, OpenDocument (.odt), Word 97–2003 (.doc), HTML or plain text. Footnotes and endnotes are read too.

Bibliography: the manuscript’s own reference list, and optionally BibTeX (.bib), CSL-JSON (.json, for example exported from Zotero) or RIS (.ris) files, or a separate reference-list document (Word, PDF, Markdown or text).

Ibid looks for a heading such as “References”, “Bibliography” or “Works Cited” near the end of the manuscript, and reads the entries after it. If your list has a different heading, or is in a separate file, add that file as a bibliography file instead.

In Word files, tracked deletions are skipped, so a citation you deleted with Track Changes on isn’t checked. Tracked insertions are read as part of the text.

First check the spelling of the name and the year in both places; Ibid suggests the closest entry when there is one. If you cite an organisation by a short name, give that name in brackets in the bibliography entry, for example Space Exploration Technologies Corp. [SpaceX]. 2020., and citations to “SpaceX” will match it. Abbreviations made from an organisation’s initials, such as WHO or NASA, are matched without brackets.

Yes, in Ibid › Settings.

Author–date styles, such as APA, Chicago author-date, ASA and Harvard, and Chicago notes and bibliography. It understands citations like (Scott 1998, 87), (Scott 1998: 87–89), Scott (1998), (Scott 1998; Bourdieu 1984), (Weber 1922a, 1922b), Pandoc keys like [@scott1998, 87] and LaTeX \cite{scott1998}.

In footnotes, full notes like James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 87., short notes like Scott, Seeing Like a State, 87., and Ibid. and Idem are all checked against the bibliography.

Ibid recognises MLA (author–page) and numbered citation styles and says so in the results, but doesn’t check them yet. Their bibliography entries are shown, without “Not cited in text” verdicts.

No. If the manuscript has its own reference list, Ibid reads it, including 3-em dashes for a repeated author (———. 1990.), original and reprint years like 1989 [1859], year letters, page ranges and DOIs. Add an export from your reference manager only if you also want to check against it.

Ibid can read only the files you choose (a Mac App Store rule). A link or alias to a file elsewhere isn’t covered: choose the original file instead.

Yes. Ibid reads the page layout, including two-column pages and footnotes, and lists problems by the printed page number. Results are most reliable from a PDF exported with its text (for example with Save as PDF in Word), rather than a scan. If you have the Word or LaTeX file, checking that is better still.

Pages without text are read with the Mac’s built-in text recognition, on your Mac. It sometimes misreads a letter, so a name on a scanned page may be reported as a mismatch when it’s right. Check the page itself before changing anything.

Go through To Review with the arrow keys. Copy Suggested Fix or Reference (⇧⌘C) copies the corrected citation. For a Word manuscript, File › Export Word Copy with Comments saves a copy of your document with a margin comment on each citation and bibliography entry to fix. Then fix them in Word and choose Check Again (⌘R).

For any manuscript, File › Export Report as Web Page saves a report you can open in any browser.

Mark it as reviewed with ⌘K and it stays out of the list, also next time you check the same manuscript.

No. It only reads it. The Word copy with comments is a new file; your original isn’t touched.

It checks the whole manuscript, and shows full results for the first 25 citations and the first 25 bibliography entries. A one-time in-app purchase unlocks the results for all of them, and the exports. There’s no subscription.

Choose Ibid › Settings › Restore Purchase, signed in with the same Apple Account.