Source verification for Canadian universities and colleges
Corrobora reads the reference list of every essay in a class and checks that each source exists and says what the essay claims. Instructors get evidence to help them mount a case instead of a pre-made verdict.
Verdicts decided by code, not AIEnglish and FrenchHosted in Canada
Why it matters
of the references GPT-3.5 produced in a 2023 study were fabricated. For GPT-4, 18%.
Walters & Wilder, Scientific Reports, 2023of the real references GPT-3.5 gave had substantive errors: wrong authors, years, titles or journals. For GPT-4, 24%.
Walters & Wilder, Scientific Reports, 2023The essay is still one of the best ways to see how a student thinks. Unfortunately, instructors and graders just don't have enough time to manually check every reference in a class of 80. Corrobora automates these time-consuming tasks so you can focus on grading.
Several checks, one report
Hallucinated references or references that are stitched together from real parts (a real journal with an invented title, the wrong authors, a DOI that leads to another article).
Hard evidence
Reference lists that look the way AI chooses sources (the most cited works, by the most famous authors, in the highest-impact journals).
Narcissource profiles are not definitive proof.
Real sources cited for things they don't say or a lack of citations in a paragraph. Corrobora reads the source's open-access text, abstract or web page and compares it with the student's sentence, and checks paragraphs for their citation density.
Hard evidence when the full text is available, and a time-saver for finding unsubstantiated claims in long essays.
Beyond the checks
Two tools for what instructors do next: send a case to the integrity office, and grade how well students used their sources.
Choose the findings that matter, add your comments, and Corrobora prepares a file for the committee in English or French, sealed with the student's original essay.
Set what each assignment asks of its sources and formatting, and the ledger shows who meets it. One less thing to count by hand when grading.
How is Corrobora different?
Sell to students too, and some help them suggest references that look plausible.
Is for instructors only. There is no student version, and it never suggests sources.
Judge the writing itself: style, wording, how “AI-like” it sounds.
Checks only the sources, and whether the essay reports them accurately.
Give a score and leave the instructor to justify it.
Gives the evidence an academic integrity file needs: the source, the passage and the rule applied.
Send student essays to AI models for analysis.
Never sends an essay to an outside AI service.
Report a percentage of “AI writing” that is itself an AI's opinion.
Reports no AI percentages. Every finding is something you can check yourself.
Are often run and hosted outside Canada.
Is Canadian, and keeps your data in Canada, hosted only with Canadian-owned companies.
Example report
How it works
You can submit Word, PDF or txt files interchangeably for the whole class at the same time. Name files LastName_StudentID and Corrobora fills in the student details.
Everything runs in the background. Re-uploaded essays will trigger new checks, and citation-bibliography pairings can be changed manually.
Corrobora outputs a ledger for the class, a report per essay, and integrity reports in problematic cases.
Corrobora never says a student cheated. It flags suspicious content for the instructor to review.
APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, plus the styles your institution builds.
Essays, sources and the interface in English and French.
A top administrator, central administration, faculty and department administrators, instructors, and teaching assistants (appointed for one semester), each with the access their role needs.
Our values
Each institution's essays sit in its own database, seen only by the instructors of the course. Nothing is sold, shared or used to train AI.
Student data is kept in Canada, hosted only with Canadian-owned companies. It never leaves Canada without your institution's written consent.
Every verdict comes from written rules, and every finding shows what was compared. Every action is recorded in an audit log, so any result can be explained and checked. No AI decides anything, since only a person can be accountable. See the rules.
Pricing
All checks are included in every plan. Prices are in Canadian dollars, per year.
One department, one term, for founding partners in 2026–27
per full-time equivalent student per year, minimum $6,000
per full-time equivalent student per year, minimum $40,000
Prices before tax. Multi-year and consortium pricing available.
Pilot 2026–27
We are looking for a small number of departments to use Corrobora for one term, free, and tell us what works. Tell us a little about yours.
Questions
No. AI-text detectors guess from writing style, and their errors fall on real students. Corrobora checks something that can be verified: whether the sources exist and say what the essay claims.
No. It gathers evidence and shows its reasons. Deciding what a finding means, and what to do about it, stays with the instructor and the institution's academic integrity process.
No. Essays stay in your institution's own assigned database.
Open-access articles and books, abstracts, and web pages such as government reports and news. Paywalled sources show as “No text available” for now. We are open to agreements with university libraries so Corrobora can read the sources they subscribe to: talk to us.
APA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, ISO 690, DIN 1505, INRS and custom styles your institution's administrators build. Reference lists are found under headings in many languages. Essays and sources in English and French, including laws, grey literature and secondary citations (“as cited in”).
Not yet. For now, instructors upload the essays as Word, PDF or txt files. Integration with learning management systems is on our roadmap.