Citation Support Checklist

Check resolution, identity, entailment, and placement

First confirm the link resolves to the intended source and is not a search page, unrelated redirect, or fabricated address. Then confirm title, author or publisher, version, and date. Next read the cited passage and ask whether it directly supports the exact nearby claim. Finally, place the citation where a reader can tell which sentence it supports.

Watch for scope drift: a source about one model, plan, jurisdiction, benchmark, date, or population cannot silently support all others. A source that reports an association does not prove causation. A provider feature page does not establish independent comparative superiority.

Run a claim-level citation audit

Treat model-generated citations as unverified suggestions until you open them. Do not grant an agent permission to access restricted systems merely to make a citation look complete.

Claim ID: [C-001]
Citation: [URL OR SAFE SOURCE ID]
Resolves: [YES | NO]
Identity matches: [TITLE, PUBLISHER, VERSION, DATE]
Supporting passage: [SAFE QUOTE LOCATION OR SECTION]
Support strength: [DIRECT | PARTIAL | BACKGROUND | CONTRADICTS]
Scope matches: [YES | QUALIFICATION NEEDED]
Placement unambiguous: [YES | NO]
Accessible alternative: [HTML OR TEXT AVAILABLE]
Action: [KEEP | REPLACE | QUALIFY | REMOVE]

Expected evidence and verification

The expected evidence is an audit row for every material citation, with a resolvable source, matching identity, located supporting passage, scope decision, and corrective action.

Open links in a clean session, verify access without relying on cached snippets, compare the source passage with the full claim, and recheck numerical and temporal qualifiers. Sample low-risk citations and inspect every high-consequence citation. Preserve an accessible text alternative when the source format is difficult to use.