1. A computer-based method for preparing a document for publication, the method comprising: receiving an electronic document previously prepared by an author using a formatting structure, the electronic document including a set of cited references and having metadata associated with the set of cited references embedded in accordance with the formatting structure; and executing on the electronic document a reference validation process adapted to recognize the formatting structure and the embedded metadata and further adapted to extract the embedded metadata and compare the extracted metadata against a set of at least one authority database to determine the validity of the set of cited references.