Benthic 1.0: check every reference before you cite it
The first public release is here. Benthic checks reading lists from language models, rates them and fetches the real papers from open-access sources.
Language models are quick with literature. One question, and ten sources appear, neatly formatted, with authors, year and DOI. Not all of them hold up: some titles do not exist, some DOIs belong to a different paper entirely, and now and then one of them was retracted long ago. Checking that by hand easily takes an hour for a single list.
Benthic saves you that hour. The first public release, 1.0.0, is free and open source, speaks English and German, and runs on any Mac with macOS 13 or later.
What Benthic 1.0 does
- Check. Paste a chat answer, a reading list, BibTeX or RIS, or drop a whole thesis as PDF, Word or LaTeX. Benthic finds every reference, looks it up in Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv and Open Library, and gives it one of seven verdicts, from verified to retracted.
- Quote and passage. Direct quotations are looked up word for word in the source's full text, and for any confirmed source Benthic finds the passage closest to your sentence, with the page number.
- Rate. For the whole list, Benthic shows how healthy it is: how many sources are real, how old they are, which journals they appeared in, and which citation style the list follows.
- Fetch. Benthic brings real sources into your library from eight open-access sources and says which version each one is. Where no free version exists, it opens the article through your university's access.
- Watch and batch. The retraction watch rechecks your projects every day, and lecturers check a whole folder of submissions at once.
- Work with AI. Through MCP, Claude, ChatGPT with Codex, Gemini CLI and other assistants use Benthic as a tool and check their own sources with it.
What Benthic does not do
Benthic does not get around paywalls. It only fetches what publishers, repositories or authors make freely available themselves. And it does not read for you: whether a source supports your claim is still your call.
What comes next
Versions for Windows and Linux are next on the roadmap. What follows is partly up to you: the roadmap lists every request, and you vote on GitHub with 👍 or 👎. You can submit your own idea there with a short form.
The source code is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Bug reports and ideas are welcome there.