Dear Colleagues,

I am about to finish my writing and I plan to submit my thesis to the university in May. I am already editing the format and trying to find typos and other mistakes....
I have been always obssessed with references and if they are corrected cited and so on.
Since I've been reading too much for writing my thesis and during my PhD, I would like to double check if my citations are correct. I mean check if the papers I read are really corresponding to my citations. As I mentioned I read too much and sometimes we can match references or make mistakes. I would not like any embarassing situation and this is the reason I ask for some advice.
Would you have any idea how to efficiently do this? what would you do?
Is anyone else doing so or just me that has this obsession? :(
If the thing is go and re-read citation per citation I will do anyway. I rather prefer 2-3 days sleepless than having problems with this. My PhD was a really really hard and painful time :/
Thank you!
Best,

Johannes

I knew all my references inside out anyway, so I was always sure they were the correct ones. Plus, I used to highlight the key points in them, so it was obvious why I was citing them if I did want to check.

I doubt you will find a service for this. You know your thesis and topic area better than anyone else. You should check them if you are worried.

I included the title in my references to help with this.
I wouldn't say I ever learned all 300 plus references inside out as TOL managed but I could look at each title and recall the reason I was referencing it.

I am not at this stage of my thesis yet. But I would treat it the same as I do any other piece of academic writing (e.g., undergrad dissertation, masters thesis, paper) and go through each reference section by section ticking it off to make sure it really was relevant/that I meant to include it. Often I remove the low quality ones when doing this too, as I prefer quality rather than quality (apart from in those cases where there isn't much done on a topic and you need to cite all you can that is out there). I agree that you need to do this yourself, as by going through the process you will actually be refreshing and reorganising things in your brain, and feel a lot more confident at the end of it than if there was someone else who could do it for you and say yep, they're all fine. You could use the activity as part of your viva prep.

Ps. I hope I finish writing in good time like you have!

Hi Johannes, I think when you are going through your thesis and checking everything you do go through your citations and check that they match up to a reference in your references section correctly, and if you can't remember the reference once you have seen the title, then you go back and check the abstract or article, or your notes, to ensure that citation is correct.

There will be many that you know inside and out, and there will be others that you are less sure of, so it doesn't necessarily take as long as you think. As you say, 2-3 days set aside for this is reasonable.

I did this and no citations/references were queried regarding content or relevance but I noted that my examiners were very aware of the references and picked up any anomalies.

(In my case this amounted to a small number of references, where I had included a terminating comma with a book chapter reference. In the case of book chapters there are no terminating commas but with journal articles there are and in my final checks with a particular book which included several different chapters written by different authors, cited a few times for the different chapters, I had automatically included a comma on this set of book chapter references when there should be none and omitted a comma with a small number of journal references.

I didn't use referencing software as it caused problems with my document btw, so the mistake was my error-overlooked- I really couldn't see it because I was very tired by that time when I was doing final checks. Overlooked by my supervisors as well but picked up by a sharp eyed examiner. I had originally used referencing software but had to completely remove it when it became problematic so this became another issue...)

In addition, because the book chapter reference was copied and pasted in part when I repeated the reference in the refs section, I replicated my error inadvertently).