When we talk about academic writing, the first thing that comes to mind is of a caffeinated researcher hunched over a laptop, dozens of browser tabs open, writing and deleting every other sentence.
We’ve all been in situations where one tab holds a journal article you might cite, another a reference manager, the third a thesaurus opened not for better prose, but because the right scientific term is sitting somewhere in your brain and stubbornly refusing to surface.
Ref-N-Write appears to be built for exactly this scenario.
The tool is built by a doctor and researcher. It promises to keep researchers inside their document while offering structured academic phrases, in-context paraphrasing, citation support, and plagiarism checks.
But does it truly deliver all of that in real-world research workflows?
In this article, we put Ref-N-Write to the test. You’ll find a thorough, first-hand review of its features, pros, cons, and practical guidance on how to use it to make research easier.
Key Takeaways
- Ref-N-Write is an academic assistant for researchers with discipline-specific support features such as the 20,000-phrase Academic Phrasebank, in-Word referencing, cross-referencing, and building personal research libraries.
- The tool integrates into Microsoft Word and Google Docs as add-ins, preventing you from switching tabs as you write.
- Ref-N-Write has collaborated with CopyLeaks for AI and plagiarism detector capabilities. In real-world testing, it achieved an 80% accuracy rate as opposed to 99% accuracy claimed by CopyLeaks.
- Undetectable AI complements Ref-N-Write with more accurate AI detection and context-aware paraphrasing.
What Is Ref N Write?
Ref‑N‑Write is a purpose‑built academic writing assistant for researchers. It integrates with Microsoft Word and provides tools that make scholarly composition easier.
It was founded by Premkumar Elangovan, a doctor and healthcare researcher based in Guildford, England.
Ref-N-Write comes as a plugin for Microsoft Word. You have to download the plugin to your device to use most of its features.
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It includes:
- A massive searchable academic phrasebank, similar to the Manchester Academic Phrasebank
- An AI Paraphrasing tool
- A built‑in plagiarism and AI‑content checker (powered by Copyleaks)
- A Knowledge Hub, which is a collection of blog posts and educational material for researchers
Key Features of Ref N Write
The highlight of Ref-N-Write is its academic phrasebank, arguably the largest and most comprehensive library of English academic phrases.
These 20,000 phrases are organized into 17 discipline-focused categories that correspond to different aspects of research manuscripts:
- Introduction
- Problem, Solution & Difficulties
- Literature Review
- Previous Evidence and Findings
- Research Gap
- Your Work
- Section Introduction and Scope
- Materials and Methods
- Measurements and Calculations
- Technical Statements
- Data Collection and Processing
- Data Analysis & Presentation
- Statistics
- Errors and Discrepancies
- Results
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
The paraphrasing tool enables users to rewrite or rephrase sentences without changing their meaning, an essential feature to prevent unintentional plagiarism.
It has also collaborated with Copyleaks, a popular AI detection system, for high-quality, reliable plagiarism reports.
The tool scans your paper against over 16,000 academic journals, including publications from Frontiers, Wiley, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and thousands of other open-access sources.
The Ref‑N‑Write referencing tool is used for inserting citations as you write in Microsoft Word, without having to change any tabs and switching to other software.
It verifies your citations against sources available online so you don’t end up making mistakes there.
How Ref-N-Write Works
Ref‑N‑Write is available as a Microsoft Word add-in for both Windows and Mac, and also as a Google Docs plugin.
So no matter where you draft, the tool is accessible without switching platforms.
Once installed, Ref N Write appears as a dedicated tab on Word’s top taskbar.
When you click on it, you can see its entire academic writing suite consisting of phrasebank, paraphrasing tools, plagiarism checks, referencing options, etc.
On the dashboard, users can import reference documents and research papers through drag-and-drop functionality. It allows you to group papers into libraries as you like.
Within your imported documents, you can search across all references while writing and pull ideas and citations without leaving Word.
Ref-N-Write also allows cross-referencing within your imported documents to identify supporting evidence.
One of its standout features is the AI Plagiarism Checker backed by CopyLeaks.
As you write, Ref‑N‑Write flags potential plagiarism such that:
- Green highlights indicate your content is clean
- Red highlights alert you to potential plagiarism issues
The real-time feedback as you write avoids last-minute plagiarism checks and rewrites.
You can use the paraphrasing tool to restructure sentences highlighted in red. When you do so, it also takes care of grammar and language errors automatically.
Sometimes, researchers get stuck where the exact academic terms don’t come to mind. The rewording feature suggests scientific word replacements in place of informal words in your text.
How Accurate Is Ref N Write AI?
Accuracy claims in AI content detection are often bold. We decided to test the tool in real-world settings using the methodology inspired by ZDNet’s widely cited benchmark.
Our approach included five blocks of text: two were human-written, and three were generated by ChatGPT. Each block was fed separately into Ref‑N‑Write’s detector, and the results were recorded.
Following common practice, we treated any score above 70% as a strong probability, whether indicating human-written or AI-generated content.
Ref N Write correctly identified 4 out of the 5 samples, so it had an 80% pass rate.
All three AI-generated samples were correctly flagged, but one of the human-written blocks was misclassified as AI-generated.
Ref-n-write AI content detector is powered by Copyleaks API. It is interesting that Copyleaks has made recent claims of being “the most accurate AI detector with over 99% accuracy.”
In April 2025, the wording had been slightly revised to “99% accuracy backed by independent third-party studies.”
However, our own test suggests that such claims may be optimistic when applied to individual, real-world samples.
Several other tools surpassed CopyLeaks, and Ref‑N‑Write’s AI detector subsequently in this testing process.
For example, Undetectable AI achieved 100% accuracy in identifying AI-generated content in similar benchmarks.
The point is, Ref N Write’s AI detector may be reliable in most cases, but it is not infallible. Academia is a high-stakes area where even a single undetected AI segment can compromise your integrity as a researcher.
Therefore, relying solely on Ref‑N‑Write is risky.
You can complement Ref‑N‑Write with Undetectable AI Detector to ensure authenticity in your work, and anything that is flagged as AI-generated can be rewritten using the AI Humanizer.
Pros and Cons of Using Ref-N-Write
Now, let’s look at some of the strengths and limitations of Ref-N-Write.
They are drawn from our first-hand product testing combined with patterns observed in user reviews on Trustpilot.
Pros:
- Read’ (Text-to-Speech) feature converts written text into audio, which is very good for catching mistakes
- The Academic Phrasebank is genuinely useful in practice because of how well-organized it is
- The customer support is efficient and professional. They consistently respond faster and more clearly than most other academic software vendors
- The tool is particularly effective for non-native English speakers. It bridges the gap between good research ideas and publication-ready academic English.
Cons:
- The online AI detector is charged per upload, which becomes very expensive for researchers working with multiple drafts and long manuscripts
- The two-computer installation limit per user feels unnecessarily restrictive because academics regularly work across office, home, and laptop setups.
- The plagiarism and AI detection allowance is capped at 30 pages
- Ref-n-write paraphrasing tool still needs significant improvement to reach the level expected for scholarly publication
Ref N Write vs Undetectable AI
Ref-N-Write earns full marks for strictly academic features that you won’t find anywhere else.
The Academic Phrasebank, with its 20,000 discipline-specific phrases structured around actual paper sections, is the tool’s defining strength.
It allows you import your own reference documents, organize them into libraries, and search across them while writing, all of which are great functionalities for a research assistant.
Cross-referencing and citation support inside Word keep all your data within Word.
All in all, it is really good for drafting your research ideas into full-length manuscripts.
That said, Ref-N-Write still has significant ground to cover in two aspects, AI detection and paraphrasing.
Their AI and plagiarism detection are not in-house capabilities. It relies on Copyleaks, and so, it inherits both its pros and cons. Many users have also reported that the Ref n Write paraphrasing tool is not context-aware.
Undetectable AI, in contrast, is a great adjunct to Ref-N-Write for these two limitations.
The AI detector outperforms Copyleaks-based systems since it can reliably recognize text generated by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, and many other major AI models.
It is based on TruthScan, a system built on consensus across multiple detectors rather than a single algorithm.
Just as importantly, Undetectable AI’s paraphrasing engine is context-aware. It understands that “0.2” should not become “zero point two” in your text because that’s not how you report research findings.
The combination of Ref-N-Write and Undetectable AI is a more complete, realistic solution for researchers.
Can Ref N Write Detect AI-Edited or Paraphrased Text?
Sometimes yes, other times, not reliably enough.
Ref-N-Write’s AI detection is capable enough to recognize obvious, lightly edited AI-generated text with reasonable success.
When content is pasted directly from a large language model or only superficially paraphrased, the detector often flags it correctly.
In that sense, it performs better than many entry-level AI detectors currently on the market.
However, its accuracy drops as soon as the text becomes more sophisticated.
AI-generated content that is structurally reworked or blended with human edits is not caught by Ref-N-Write. False positives and false negatives in human-written text from non-native English speakers can be noticed.
Compared against Undetectable AI, Ref-N-Write’s detector is clearly not the best.
It is better than many detectors on the market, yes, but it does not sit at the top tier. Much of this stems from the fact that AI Detection is not an in-house capability.
Undetectable AI is not only great at identifying AI-generated text, its AI’s Paraphraser and AI Stealth Writer also make structural and stylistic changes to your text such that it becomes hard for other AI detectors to catch it.
The rewriting process preserves your technical accuracy. It just changes your syntax and phrasing to better resemble genuine human authorship.
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Conclusion
All things considered, Ref N Write is a genuinely useful addition to the academic research workflow. Non-native English speakers who struggle to express their research ideas in professional-grade academic writing will find it of great help.
Its Academic Phrasebank, in-document referencing, and structured drafting support remove much of the friction that slows researchers down.
Ref-N-Write also appears to be an actively evolving product with responsive customer support.
Regular updates to its core structure suggest that its current limitations around AI detection accuracy and paraphrasing quality are areas under development.
Until those gaps are fully addressed, pairing Ref-N-Write with Undetectable AI is the best idea.
Undetectable AI will protect you against unintended plagiarism and refine your text to meet rigorous academic standards.
Check Undetectable AI out today!