CiteStamp records who said what about which paper — signed, typed,
timestamped, public. It does not grade claims, store papers, or sell data. It keeps
a log. Citation counts tell you a number went up; the log tells you who said what,
and holds them to it.
The rules we don’t break
Signed and machine-inferred never mix. Every answer says which kind of edge
it is and who stands behind it.
No verdicts. The product is accountability, not judgment.
Papers, not people. Claims connect works. The format makes targeting a person
or institution impossible, on purpose.
Nothing of yours is stored. No full text, no abstracts, no personal data —
only links between public identifiers, dedicated to the public domain.
The log is forkable. CC0, mirrored on GitHub, independently replayable.
Trust the math, not the operator.
Questions people ask
Why use it? Google Scholar already counts my citations.
Scholar hands you a number. Forty-one citations — of what kind? Supporting your result? Refuting it? Padding a related-work section nobody read? Scholar doesn't know, doesn't say, and has no API to ask. Every claim on CiteStamp carries a type, an attribution, and a permanent receipt. Counting is easy. Standing behind a citation is the part that was missing.
Is CiteStamp a citation database like Google Scholar or scite?
No — and the database mindset is the problem we're aiming at. A database counts; nobody stands behind the count. CiteStamp is a notary: typed claims, signed by named researchers or honestly labelled as machine work, on a public append-only log. scite sells machine classification as smart citations behind a subscription; we label machine inference as machine inference and give the whole record away, CC0. No full text, no abstracts, no verdicts.
What about Web of Science and Scopus?
Paywalled gatekeepers that count only what journals bless. Publish preprints, datasets, or independent work and you simply don't exist to them. You exist here — same rails, same record, day one.
What stops someone from citation-attacking my paper?
Three protections, all structural. Claims target papers, never people — the format cannot express an attack on a person, only a position on a work, and the server enforces that at every signing path. There is no score to damage — no rankings, no disputed badge, no aggregate to brigade; a refutes edge is one named researcher's claim, not the platform's judgment of your paper. And signing costs a name: whoever disagrees with your work does it under their own researcher identity, on a permanent public log they can never quietly scrub. Review-bombing runs on anonymity and aggregate scores; CiteStamp has neither. Disagreement stays possible — that is scholarship — but it is signed, it is public, abusive keys get revoked, and one identity refuting everything you ever wrote looks exactly like what it is.
What does it cost?
Asking is free and anonymous. Signing keys are free for independent researchers, issued by hand. The bill goes to institutions and AI companies buying hosted, high-volume access — researchers aren't the product, and a CC0 public log leaves nothing to sell behind your back.
Who is behind it?
CiteStamp is a collaboration between 3Rivers WebTech, the Fort Wayne software studio that builds and operates it (under 3Rivers Enterprises LLC), and ICSAC — the Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing — which anchors the open-science side: researcher identity, editorial review, and the first signed claims on the log. The two share a founder — and a conviction that scholarly infrastructure should be open source, free for researchers, and owned by the community that uses it. The graph gives no one’s content special treatment.
Can a signed claim be deleted?
No — and that is the point. A claim signed in error is retracted by a second signed, public event that points at the first. Both stay on the log, so the record is never silently rewritten.
What happens to the data if CiteStamp shuts down?
The signed log is CC0 and mirrored publicly on GitHub. Anyone can fork it and rebuild the graph — the record is designed to outlive its operator.
Contact
Everything goes through [email protected] —
key requests, API access, press, problems. A human reads it.