Citation Verification Protocol (CVP)

The Citation Verification Protocol (CVP) is a methodological framework providing a structured, auditable process for verifying citation integrity, provenance consistency, and source traceability in any document whose claims rest on cited sources. CVP addresses two core failure modes commonly observed in AI-assisted research: Confirming that cited sources actually exist and match the cited bibliographic identity Determining whether those sources substantively support the specific claims for which they are cited The second requirement is what distinguishes CVP from ordinary citation checking. The verifier must retrieve the source, read the portion of it that bears on the claim, and record the evidence found there, rather than confirming only that the work exists. The protocol defines a clear, auditable workflow for citation existence verification, access verification, claim-level support verification, detection of common AI failure modes, and tiered verification rigor appropriate to publication risk. Key features of CVP: Public Verifiability Constraint (PVC): an access gate operating through two selectable profiles. Open-Publication requires freely accessible full-text sources and excludes anything paywalled, authenticated, or partially viewable. Licensed-Access records access descriptively for settings where authoritative sources are licensed, purchased, or unpublished Foundational-text provision: a narrow, explicitly bounded allowance for long-established works cited for what they are widely known for, carrying the ATTRIBUTED rating and barred from load-bearing claims Persistence and Archiving Requirement (PAR): capturing archival snapshots and content hashes to preserve auditability Evidence anchors: requiring specific page or section pointers and excerpts for claim support verification Explicit support ratings (FULL / PARTIAL / NONE / AMBIGUOUS / ATTRIBUTED) with clear disposition rules Citation brief method: an extract of only the cited passages, claims, and references, replacing full-document ingestion for large or multi-document runs Multi-pass escalation: a four-step sequence for locating evidence held in appendices, supplementary materials, or companion documents rather than the primary source Access may be restricted. Reading may not be skipped. No support rating may be assigned from an abstract, an index record, a snippet, or a summary. This requirement is absolute and does not vary by domain or by profile. CVP is platform-agnostic by design, but requires that the verifier reach actual source text at verification time, whether by live browsing, licensed database access, or a lawfully held copy. Systems relying solely on training data, cached results, or simulated behavior cannot execute this protocol reliably. CVP explicitly does not replace scholarly responsibility. It requires researchers to personally read and evaluate source materials. CVP serves as a verification safeguard, helping detect non-existent citations, mischaracterized sources, and unsupported claims before publication. While originally developed within the Synthience Institute, CVP is published as a general-purpose verification tool for any work in which a claim rests on a source, across scientific, technical, policy, legal, clinical, regulatory, and commercial domains. Applied example: CVP was applied to verify all citations in the RICO (Relationally-Induced Coherence Organization) technical report (10.5281/zenodo.18086834). The complete verification is documented in the RICO Citation Verification Report (10.5281/zenodo.18082749). That report also documents a verification failure: an earlier run passed a citation containing an author name absent from the source, because the verifier encountered the discrepancy and did not assign the AMBIGUOUS rating the protocol requires. The failure is published rather than quietly repaired, on the view that a demonstration artifact is more useful when it shows the protocol's real failure mode than when it shows only a clean pass. v1.5 update: Scope generalized beyond academic citation checking to any document whose claims rest on sources. PVC restructured from a single mandatory exclusion gate into two selectable profiles, adding LICENSED-FULLTEXT and INTERNAL access classes so the protocol can run where authoritative sources are licensed, purchased, or unpublished. New Section 1.1.1 states the foundational-text provision and its limits. New ATTRIBUTED support rating added with disposition rules. New Section 4.5 (Citation Brief Method) and Section 4.6 (Multi-Pass Escalation), both validated in a seven-document verification run. Canonical identifier guidance extended to legal, clinical, regulatory, standards, and internal source types. Log fields, certification template, and quick-reference checklist updated accordingly. No change to the three-part verification method of Section 5. Document ID: SF0037 Author: Thomas W. Gantz Affiliation: Synthience Institute License: CC-BY 4.0 Concept DOI (all versions): 10.5281/zenodo.18075624 For published work and Institute information: synthience.org