What Happens to Citations When AI Rewrites Academic Text? A Large-Scale Paired Audit

Working paper and evidence data. A paired audit of 213,881 in-text citation marks across 60,786 human-AI rewrite pairs from eight model configurations in six families. 96.9 percent of citation marks survived rewriting unchanged; 2.26 percent were corrupted (dropped, altered, or without a source counterpart), and the corruption rate varied 28-fold across models on identical inputs. Files: the per-citation evidence extract (one row per citation mark with verdict and match evidence; pair identifiers are opaque and no passage text is included), extraction, alignment, validation, and analysis code, figures, and the paper PDF. Source and rewrite passage texts are not released. Paper page: https://textpulse.ai/research/ai-citation-rewrite-fidelity