How citations and validation work

Every factual claim in a FedGrade Brief is paired with a verbatim excerpt of a public source. This page explains the validation badge on each Brief and what "insufficient evidence" actually means.

The validation pipeline

After synthesis and before delivery, the citation validator checks the Brief:

1. Verbatim check. Each cited excerpt must be a verbatim, contiguous substring of the passage it claims to come from. Whitespace or punctuation drift fails this check.
2. Claim-support check. A separate model judges whether the cited excerpt actually supports the claim written next to it. A paraphrase that changes the meaning fails.

This is a two-strike process. If the first draft fails, the Brief is re-synthesized once with corrected quotes. If the second draft still fails, FedGrade does not ship unsupported claims — the Brief is delivered in the insufficient evidence state instead. Claims that failed are recorded with the Brief (validation_failed_claims) for audit.

A separate source-integrity check then confirms that every citation resolves to a stored source record.

The badge

Each Brief carries one validation badge:

• Citations verified — every claim matched its excerpt on the first pass, and every citation resolves to a stored source.
• Re-synthesized · citations verified — the first draft failed, the Brief was regenerated with corrected quotes, and the result passed.
• Not verified — the Brief's prose passed validation, but some citations could not be resolved to a stored source; the badge says how many.
• Citations not yet checked — the source-integrity check has not run on this Brief yet. An unchecked Brief is never shown as verified.
• Insufficient verifiable evidence — validation failed twice. The Brief body is held back rather than shown with quotes that might be wrong, and you can review the raw retrieved passages instead.

What "insufficient evidence" means

Insufficient evidence means the model wrote claims the retrieved sources could not back up — usually because retrieval returned passages that were only loosely relevant. The right response is not to fix the model output; it is to find better sources. If you know of a missing source, use Report inaccuracy below the Brief or open a ticket in the Data concern category.

Reading a citation

Click a citation marker in the Brief to jump to the source it points at. Each citation carries the source type (notice, filing, regulation and so on), the source record, and the verbatim excerpt the claim rests on.

Why this matters

Many tools in this category summarize without grounding. FedGrade's hard rule is that nothing leaves the system without a verbatim citation — and when that cannot be met, the product says so instead of guessing.