--- title: About - Scholar Sidekick description: Who builds Scholar Sidekick and why - an independent, one-person project by a clinician-educator in Australia, built for deterministic citations. doc_version: "1.0" last_updated: "2026-10-26" --- # About Scholar Sidekick > Who builds Scholar Sidekick and why. > HTML version: https://scholar-sidekick.com/about > Last updated: 2026-10-26 Scholar Sidekick resolves scholarly identifiers (DOI, PMID, PMCID, ISBN, arXiv and others), checks that a citation matches the record its identifier points to, and formats or exports the result. It is available as a website, an API, and an MCP server for AI assistants. ## Who builds it Scholar Sidekick is built and run by Mark Lavercombe, a clinician-educator in Australia. It is an independent, one-person project. I built it because I wanted a citation formatter and verifier I could rely on: one that gives the same output for the same input, every time, and shows where each answer came from. ## How it earns trust - **Deterministic output.** Identical input gives identical output. Any change to output is versioned and recorded in the [changelog](https://scholar-sidekick.com/changelog.md). - **Checkable claims.** The [verification kit](https://scholar-sidekick.com/verification.md) lets you test those promises against the live API yourself. - **Published limits.** The verifier's measured accuracy and its known failure cases are on the [citation integrity](https://scholar-sidekick.com/citation-integrity.md) page. - **Stated design rules.** See the [engineering principles](https://scholar-sidekick.com/engineering-principles.md) and the [explainer](https://scholar-sidekick.com/explainer.md) for what the tool does and deliberately does not do. ## Where the data comes from Records come from the registries of record for each identifier, including Crossref, DataCite, PubMed and PubMed Central, arXiv, NASA ADS, Open Library, Unpaywall, and OpenAlex. Scholar Sidekick is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of these services or by any institution. What is stored, and for how long, is set out in the [privacy policy](https://scholar-sidekick.com/legal/privacy.md). ## Contact Email . Service availability is on the [status page](https://status.scholar-sidekick.com), and source code for the open-source clients is on [GitHub](https://github.com/mlava). ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](https://scholar-sidekick.com/sitemap.md) for all pages.