CiteIntegrity respects the confidentiality of academic work. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, protect, retain, and disclose information when you use CiteIntegrity, including citation checking, reference verification, citation integrity reports, payment access, dashboards, and related support services.
CiteIntegrity is an academic citation integrity service operated as part of Anovlad Technologies. For privacy questions, requests, or concerns, contact:
Privacy Contact: Anovlad Technologies
Email: support@citeintegrity.org
Website: https://citeintegrity.org
For the purposes of this policy, “CiteIntegrity”, “we”, “our”, and “us” refer to the operator of the CiteIntegrity service. “You” refers to a user, visitor, author, student, supervisor, examiner, institutional user, or other person who uses the service.
This policy applies to information processed through:
When you submit a document for analysis, we may process:
If you create an account, request access, use a paid feature, or use an institutional arrangement, we may process:
When you pay for access, payment is handled by third-party payment processors such as Stripe or Paystack. We may receive and store limited payment records, including payment status, amount, currency, transaction reference, payment processor, customer email, access entitlement, and timestamps. We do not intentionally collect or store full card numbers, card security codes, or bank login details on CiteIntegrity servers.
To keep the service reliable and secure, we may process:
If you contact us, we may process your name, email address, message content, attachments, and any information needed to respond to your enquiry.
We use information for the following purposes:
| Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|
| Provide the service | Upload handling, citation extraction, reference matching, verification, report generation, result display, and downloads. |
| Verify citations and references | Query scholarly metadata services using citation or reference metadata. |
| Manage payments and access | Unlock paid results, confirm successful payments, prevent duplicate access issues, and handle payment disputes. |
| Maintain security and reliability | Detect abuse, prevent unauthorised access, troubleshoot errors, manage queues, and protect the service. |
| Improve the service | Use aggregated and technical data to improve speed, accuracy, usability, and resilience. |
| Communicate with users | Respond to support requests, account questions, payment issues, institutional enquiries, and privacy requests. |
| Comply with legal obligations | Maintain payment records, respond to lawful requests, enforce terms, and meet accounting or regulatory duties. |
Depending on your location and the context of use, we rely on one or more lawful bases to process personal data:
CiteIntegrity is designed for academic and professional document review. We treat uploaded academic documents as confidential user content. We do not:
You remain responsible for ensuring that you have the right or permission to upload any document you submit, especially where it contains confidential, unpublished, institutional, student, co-author, or third-party content.
CiteIntegrity may use trusted service providers and scholarly metadata services to operate the platform. These providers process information only as needed for their role.
| Service Category | Examples | Purpose | Data Shared or Processed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting and infrastructure | Render or equivalent hosting providers | Host the website, application, queues, logs, and databases | Uploaded files during processing, job data, logs, and operational records |
| Database and queue infrastructure | PostgreSQL, Redis, or equivalent services | Store job status, results, access status, statistics, and queue information | Processing status, result data, limited document-derived data, access records, and operational metadata |
| Scholarly metadata services | Crossref, OpenAlex | Verify citations, references, DOIs, titles, and bibliographic records | Reference strings, titles, authors, years, DOIs, and limited citation context where needed |
| Payment processors | Stripe, Paystack | Process payments, confirm transactions, manage access unlocks, and prevent fraud | Payment details handled by the processor, plus limited payment status and transaction metadata returned to CiteIntegrity |
| Support and communications | Email or support tools | Respond to enquiries and provide service support | Contact details and message content you provide |
Where a third-party service has its own privacy policy, its processing is governed by that service’s terms and privacy commitments. We choose service providers with a view to reliability, security, and professional data handling.
CiteIntegrity may use cookies, browser storage, or similar technologies for essential service functions, such as keeping session state, remembering job status, preventing duplicate submissions, maintaining paid access status, improving security, and supporting dashboard performance.
We do not use cookies to sell personal information. If we later introduce optional analytics, advertising, or marketing cookies, we will update this policy and provide any consent controls required by applicable law.
We keep information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy, unless a longer period is required by law, security needs, dispute resolution, accounting, or service administration.
| Data Type | Typical Retention Approach |
|---|---|
| Uploaded document files | Retained only as needed to process the job, display results, support paid access, or troubleshoot. Scheduled for deletion after the service access period unless a longer period is required. |
| Extracted text and citation context | Retained only as needed to generate and display reports, support verification, recover job results, or troubleshoot errors. |
| Analysis results and reports | May be retained temporarily so users can return to results, unlock paid access, download reports, or complete verification. |
| Payment and transaction records | Retained as needed for accounting, fraud prevention, dispute handling, legal compliance, and audit purposes. |
| Account, coupon, institutional, and access records | Retained while the account, access arrangement, coupon, or institutional relationship remains active, and for a reasonable period afterwards. |
| Server, security, and error logs | Retained for a limited period needed for security, debugging, reliability, abuse prevention, and incident response. |
| Aggregated or anonymised statistics | May be retained for long-term service analytics because they do not identify a particular user or document. |
If you need a shorter retention period for institutional, unpublished, sensitive, or confidential documents, contact us before uploading so we can confirm whether an appropriate arrangement is available.
We use reasonable technical and organisational safeguards designed to protect information from unauthorised access, loss, misuse, alteration, or disclosure. These measures may include:
No internet service can guarantee absolute security. Users should avoid uploading documents they are not authorised to submit and should remove unnecessary sensitive personal information before upload where possible.
CiteIntegrity and its service providers may process information in United Kingdom, Ghana and in other countries where our infrastructure, hosting, payment, support, or metadata providers operate. These countries may have privacy laws that differ from those in your location.
Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards, contractual protections, provider security commitments, and other lawful transfer mechanisms to protect personal data transferred across borders.
Depending on your location, you may have rights to:
To exercise a privacy right, contact us using the email address in Section 1. We may need to verify your identity before responding. We will respond within a reasonable period and in line with applicable law.
Where Ghanaian data protection law applies, we aim to process personal data fairly, lawfully, transparently, and for specific purposes connected to the CiteIntegrity service. Users may contact us about access, correction, deletion, or concerns relating to personal data.
Where GDPR, UK GDPR, or similar laws apply, this policy explains our purposes, categories of data, lawful bases, recipients, international transfers, retention approach, and user rights. You may also have the right to complain to your local supervisory authority.
Where applicable, users may have rights to know, access, correct, delete, and receive information about certain disclosures of personal information. CiteIntegrity does not sell personal information and does not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising.
CiteIntegrity uses automated citation and reference analysis to generate advisory outputs such as match rates, verification labels, missing citation lists, uncited reference lists, recovery suggestions, and ACII scores. These outputs are intended to support human review. They should not be treated as final academic, disciplinary, employment, publication, or legal decisions without human evaluation.
CiteIntegrity is intended for academic, institutional, professional, and adult users. Students should use the service in line with their institution’s rules and any applicable supervision requirements. If we learn that a child has provided personal data without appropriate authorisation where required by law, we will take reasonable steps to delete or restrict that data.
If we identify a security incident that affects personal data, we will investigate, take reasonable containment steps, and notify affected users or regulators where required by applicable law.
By using CiteIntegrity, you confirm that:
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the service, law, infrastructure, payment arrangements, or data practices. The updated version will be posted on this page with a revised “Last updated” date. Material changes may be highlighted on the website or communicated where appropriate.
For questions about this Privacy Policy, document confidentiality, privacy rights, or data handling, contact:
Anovlad Technologies
Email: support@citeintegrity.org
Website: https://citeintegrity.org