Sourced Reports

14.5. Sourced Reports — Grounded, Traceable Reports

Core principle: every claim taken from an external source carries a citation

This is exactly the official Grounded Citations skill — every claim taken from an external source gets an inline numbered citation plus a “Sources:” list at the end, Perplexity-style. The scope is broad: from chat answers, to written documents (markdown, PDF, docx, slides), to full research reports.

When to use it, when to skip it

Use it for: research, comparisons, news summaries, “what is the current state of X”, any document written to disk that cites/paraphrases/reports facts from external sources, fact-finding the user will want to double-check, and multi-source synthesis where conflicting sources need to make clear who said what. Skip inline citations when the lookup is merely auxiliary to another task — a quick syntax/version check in the middle of coding, casual conversation, creative writing.

The “ledger” mechanism — citation numbers never come from the model’s memory

This is the most important technical point, and it guarantees integrity: a ledger script owns the url → [sequence number] mapping, so the numbers and URLs always come from actually retrieved data, never from the model’s memory — the model only emits the small integers it has been handed, and does not invent numbers or URLs on its own.

For high-risk work — the full fact-checking chain

That same ledger also serves as a fact-verification chain: a verbatim quote is attached to each source (rejected unless it actually appears verbatim in the fetched page content), claims from the model’s own knowledge are clearly marked [unverified], and the verify --evidence step will fail any draft that has a citation without actual evidence attached.

Notes

• For any report/document that will be used to make real decisions, always enable ledger-backed citations — don’t accept a synthesis that “sounds plausible” without a link back to the actual source.
• For extremely sensitive work (legal, financial, medical reports), use the verify --evidence step as a mandatory checkpoint before treating a draft as done — don’t rely on “skimmed it and it seemed fine”.
• Combine directly with Competitor Analysis (14.3) and Document Synthesis (14.4): every synthesized report from those two processes should pass through this citation step before delivery — turning a convenient summary into a document genuinely trustworthy enough to act on.