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For Educators
Information for academic skills teams, librarians, and academic integrity offices
If a tool involving AI has landed on your desk, you're right to be cautious by default. This page exists to explain plainly what LitMark actually does — and, just as importantly, what it deliberately doesn't do.
Both of LitMark's founders are current university lecturers, which is also why this exists. We see the same rise in undisclosed AI use in student work that you do, from the same side of the problem, and we built LitMark because we have a direct stake in protecting academic integrity rather than working around it.
The single thing worth understanding: LitMark never generates any part of a student's essay, argument, or analysis — that stays entirely their own. The one place it does generate text is a short summary of a source the student has already found — describing what that paper actually says, in LitMark's own words, purely to help the student organise their own research. That text is never inserted into an essay; it's closer to a reading note than to writing.
What a student actually gets
- A research aid, not a writer. A student types their assignment question and gets real academic papers back (free to read by default, with an option to include papers without free full text), with the most relevant sentence in each highlighted for them. LitMark never drafts, phrases, or suggests any part of their own argument.
- A citation fidelity check. Once a student has written their own essay, LitMark checks every citation against the actual source it points to — including sources they can't read the full text of, since it verifies against the real abstract, and parts of the full text where that is openly available. Each citation is tagged faithful, overstated, misrepresented, fabricated or unable to verify, and where it cannot check a claim it says so rather than guessing. The essay itself is used once for the check and is not stored by LitMark. It catches a fabricated or misrepresented citation before submission, not after.
- An honest, two-sided view of evidence when a student is testing a claim or hypothesis — genuine supporting and challenging sources, side by side, so they build their own argument from real material rather than a single confirming search.
- A summary of a saved source, on request. A student can ask for a short, plain-language description of what a paper they've saved actually offers for their question — generated in LitMark's own words. This is the one place LitMark does generate text, and it describes the source, never the student's own argument — it's never inserted into an essay, and reads more like a reading note a student might jot down for themselves than anything resembling ghostwriting.
Why this is different from most AI tools you've encountered
Most tools generating concern in this space produce text a student could submit directly. LitMark structurally cannot do that — there is no feature, mode, or prompt in the product that generates essay prose, an argument, or analysis on a student's behalf. The research is automated. The writing, and the thinking behind it, stays entirely the student's own.
That also means a student using LitMark has nothing to hide and nothing that would register as AI-generated content, because none of their submitted work passed through generation at any point.
Put plainly: LitMark's goal is the opposite of the concern that usually motivates a tool being flagged for review. It's built specifically to help enforce honest, well-sourced academic work — a genuine helping hand and research tool, not a shortcut around the writing itself.
For institutions
We're happy to discuss a bulk license for your students, a short pilot for a department or writing centre, or simply answer questions before you'd consider recommending it. Get in touch below.
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