ReferenceLib searches and verifies against free, official, public APIs only. It does not scrape websites and does not bypass any paywall. The sources in use are: OpenAlex, for scholarly search, metadata and open-access locations; Crossref, for DOI and bibliographic verification; DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, for journal-level peer-review confirmation; and Google Books, for the optional ISBN lookup when manually citing a book. All four are free and openly licensed for this kind of use.
References and in-text citations are rendered by citeproc-js, the open-source Citation Style Language processing engine also used by Zotero and Mendeley. It is a complete, tested implementation of the published CSL specification, not a hand-written formatter. The style definitions themselves, Harvard (Cite Them Right) and APA 7th edition, are the official files published by the citation-style-language project under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.
ReferenceLib currently supports Harvard (Cite Them Right) and APA 7th edition: the two referencing styles most widely required by UK and international universities, including CIPD's own guidance. Other styles may be added in future, one at a time, once each is fully tested.