Citation
A citation is a reference in model output pointing to the specific source passage that supports a claim.
Requiring citations makes grounding checkable: a claim with no citation is visibly unsupported. The instruction must specify the citation format, or the model invents an inconsistent one — and must forbid citing anything not present in the supplied material.
Related terms
- Grounding
- Grounding is constraining a model to answer only from supplied source material, rather than from its training data.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- RAG is a technique that retrieves relevant documents from an external store and places them in the prompt, so the model answers from that material rather than from memory.
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is model output that is presented confidently as fact but is fabricated — an invented citation, statistic, quotation, function name, or event.
More on retrieval and agents
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.