Check three fictional claims and hand over a corrected summary with a traceable claim/source ledger.
Before you forward the summary
Before you forward an AI-prepared summary to a client, check what each citation actually supports. A link can open successfully and still point to a draft, the wrong reporting period, or a passage that never makes the claim.
This guide walks through a fictional reporting summary: one statement is supported, one lacks evidence, and one misrepresents its source. You will finish with a claim-by-claim record and a corrected summary. You can do the whole check with the source documents and a spreadsheet; an assistant is optional.
The example uses a fictional revenue definition to make version conflicts visible. It is a document-review exercise, not accounting advice, a client case, or evidence of any model’s performance.
Start with the summary and the originals
Download these files together:
- Synthetic source packet: two short, versioned documents you can open directly.
- Annotated summary: the three original statements, review decisions, and corrected wording.
- Filled claim/source ledger: an editable record of the worked check.
- Blank claim/source ledger: the same columns for your own review.
- Optional citation-preparation prompt: asks an assistant to propose evidence passages for human checking.
Save a copy of the summary before editing it. Keep the source revision you reviewed alongside the ledger so a teammate can repeat the check. For this exercise, the reporting date is August 31, 2026. The two documents are an approved version 2, effective July 1, and an unapproved version 3 proposal with a proposed October 1 date.
For your own task, first establish which source is approved and which date the summary covers. A recent modification date does not by itself establish either. If you cannot establish the applicable version, leave that claim unresolved and ask the document owner; do not let an assistant choose a convenient source.
Walk through the three statements
Here is the fictional draft you are checking. These are deliberately mixed-quality statements, not recommendations to send:
S1. For the August 31, 2026 reporting date, approved net revenue v2 excludes shipping. [metric.net_revenue.v2]
S2. This source proves that the workflow saves two hours per week. [metric.net_revenue.v2]
S3. Current approved net revenue includes shipping. [metric.net_revenue.v3_draft]
S1: the passage supports the statement
Open metric.net_revenue.v2 in the source packet. Its text says, “VAT and shipping are excluded.” Its metadata identifies it as approved version 2, effective July 1, 2026. The document is applicable to the example’s August reporting date.
Record supported. Keep the date and version in the final wording: “For the August 31, 2026 reporting date, approved net revenue v2 excludes shipping.” That wording makes the claim repeatable without turning it into an all-time definition of net revenue.
S2: the document exists, but the evidence does not
The same approved document defines a metric. It contains no measurement of time spent on a workflow. There is no passage to put in the ledger’s passage column for the asserted saving.
Record unsupported and remove the saving from the client summary. If the saving matters, request actual measurement evidence separately. Changing the sentence to “may save two hours” would still introduce a number this source does not support. Do not replace missing evidence with a plausible estimate.
S3: a genuine citation makes the statement misleading
Open metric.net_revenue.v3_draft. The source says, “DRAFT proposal, not approved.” It proposes including shipping, but the summary presents that proposal as the current approved rule. It also ignores the example’s August reporting date: October 1 is only the proposal’s suggested future date.
Record misleading. The citation is relevant to a proposal, not support for the claim as written. Use the approved v2 statement for the August report. If a reader needs to know about the proposal, add a separate sentence: “An unapproved v3 draft proposes including shipping from October 1, 2026.” Cite the draft and preserve both qualifications.
A shared topic is only the start of the check. To decide whether the citation supports the statement, read the passage alongside its status and applicable date.
Repeat the check in a claim/source ledger
Import the CSV into a spreadsheet, preserving source IDs and revision labels as text. If your spreadsheet asks for a separator, choose comma. The eight columns keep the statement and its evidence together:
| Column | What to enter |
|---|---|
claim_id |
A stable reference such as S1. Use a separate row for each factual claim. |
statement |
The exact wording being checked, before correction. |
source_identity |
The original document ID or direct source link, not just its title. |
revision |
The source’s version or saved revision. Do not invent a hash. |
passage |
The exact supporting text, with a page, section, or line locator where available. Leave empty if none exists. |
scope_or_date |
Approval status, effective date, and the date or context of the claim. |
verdict |
Supported, unsupported, misleading, or unresolved. |
reviewer_action |
Keep, correct, remove, or seek clarification; say what needs changing. |
Work through the summary in this order:
- Split compound claims. “The definition excludes shipping and saves time” contains two claims. The first claim’s citation cannot validate the second.
- Open the original. Navigate to the cited passage, not a search snippet or an assistant’s restatement. If you cannot access it, record unresolved rather than guessing what it says.
- Check identity and scope. Confirm version, approval status, and the date or situation the passage covers. In the example, the document’s proposed October date does not make it approved for August.
- Compare the wording. Does the passage support the entire statement? Watch for a proposal becoming a commitment, a narrow example becoming a general rule, or a number appearing without measurement.
- Write the verdict and action. A relevant source with overclaimed wording is misleading; a claim without supporting evidence is unsupported. Use unresolved when access, applicability, or conflicting authoritative evidence prevents a decision.
- Edit, then check again. Read each corrected sentence against its source. Retain the original wording and decision in the ledger so another teammate can see the repair.
Do not decide a conflict by counting links. If two apparently approved sources disagree and you cannot establish which applies, record both identities and ask the responsible owner to resolve that specific conflict. An inaccessible original also remains unverified even when its title sounds right.
What the corrected summary looks like
For the exercise’s August report, the checked factual statement is:
For the August 31, 2026 reporting date, approved net revenue v2 excludes shipping. [metric.net_revenue.v2, version 2; effective July 1, 2026]
The two-hour saving has been removed. The v3 proposal is omitted because it does not define the approved August metric. Include the qualified proposal sentence only if the recipient needs that separate context.
This statement has passed the fictional source check. For real work, the person responsible for the client summary still confirms its recipient, purpose, and any other required review. A citation check does not approve sending.
Let an assistant prepare rows, if that helps
Start manually when the summary has only a few claims and the originals are easy to open. You do not need a retrieval system or another subscription to complete this exercise.
If copying claim text and candidate passages is repetitive, use the downloadable prompt with the synthetic packet first. It asks for one candidate row per factual claim, exact source IDs, revision labels, verbatim passages, and explicit missing evidence. Treat all returned verdicts as proposals until you open the originals yourself.
The assistant must not fill a gap with outside knowledge, treat a draft as approved, or send anything. If it invents a passage, chooses between unresolved sources, or cannot identify the revision, stop using that row and return to the manual check. A well-formatted ledger is not evidence that the claims are true.
The distinction between answer quality and citation quality is also present in the 2023 ALCE research, which evaluates correctness and citations separately. That historical study informs the review method; it does not establish how a current assistant will perform on your documents.
If you are still choosing an assistant, use the single-task office comparison. Tool selection and checking support for a particular claim are separate tasks.
Finish with a repeatable handoff
Give the reviewer the corrected summary, the ledger, and the source revisions used. Ask them to reconstruct S1 from the approved passage, see why S2 was removed, and identify both the status and date problems in S3.
For real summaries, resolve or remove unsupported and misleading claims before sharing. Keep unresolved claims visibly out of the approved factual summary until their evidence is available. If a source or the summary changes later, reopen the affected rows and check them again.
The completed ledger records a traceable decision for each claim and shows a teammate what to keep, change, remove, or clarify.
Sources and limits
The worked example adapts an existing synthetic documentation corpus supplied in a research dossier dated October 10, 2026. Its fixture version labels are illustrative identifiers, not real cryptographic checksums. The review rows are authored expected decisions, not observed model outputs or an executed benchmark. No client data, measured savings, or firsthand product test is claimed.
Method reference: Gao et al., Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations, EMNLP 2023, DOI:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.398. The supplied research checked its abstract and bibliographic record on October 17, 2026; this guide uses only the separation of fluency, correctness, and citation review. No model ranking or present-day error rate is inferred.