Keep the evidence on screen

Tags: citations, sources, verification

Checking has to cost less than trusting. A click already costs more — so an answer with footnotes is auditable in principle and unaudited in practice, which is the worst of the available outcomes: the interface has discharged its obligation and the reader has verified nothing.

The click is the problem, not the solution

Every citation link asks the reader to make a decision: is this claim worth leaving the page for?

They almost always decide no, and the reason is not laziness. Following the link costs an action, a context switch, time finding the relevant part of whatever opened, and then the work of getting back to where they were and remembering what they were reading. Trusting costs nothing. Presented with that ratio a few hundred times a day, a reasonable person trusts.

So the footnote produces the appearance of verifiability. Everyone involved can point at it. Nobody is checking. And a product that measures its citations rather than its verifications will report that this is going very well.

Adjacency makes verifying a glance

The fix is geometric rather than informational. Put the source in the same viewport as the claim, with the relevant span marked, and verification stops being a navigation and becomes a saccade.

Three things have to be true for that to work:

• Same screen, same time. Not a drawer that covers the answer. Not a tab. If reading one hides the other, the reader is still doing a context switch, just a faster one.
• The span is marked, not the document. "This came from the lease" is a gesture. The highlighted clause is evidence.
• The two move together. Selecting a claim moves the source to it, and vice versa. Otherwise the reader is doing manual alignment, which is the cost you were trying to remove.

The price is honest and it is high: half your width, and a layout that can no longer be one comfortable column. That is the real reason products footnote instead, and it is worth naming rather than pretending this is free.

When the click is unavoidable

Sometimes there are forty sources, or the source is a gigabyte, or it belongs to someone who has not licensed you to display it. Then the click is real and the job shifts: make the landing precise. Opening a 300-page PDF at page one is not a citation, it is a receipt for having had one.

Grounded in

DocRobot keeps the document in view beside the conversation. Every answer sits next to the page it came from, so a team can trace a response back to its source without leaving the screen — which was not a nicety in that product but the condition of its existence, because the users were reviewing contracts they would be held to.

It cost the product half its width. Everything else in that interface had to be designed around a permanent second pane, and the redaction flow, the corpus view and the answer surface all inherited that constraint. That is the trade this pattern asks for, stated honestly: the two-pane layout is not a layout preference that happened to be available, it is the pattern, and a product that wants it has to give up the single comfortable column before anything else gets designed.

Anti-patterns

• A citation that opens at page one. The reader now has the original problem plus a lost place in the answer.
• Citation count as a trust signal. "14 sources" says nothing about whether any of them support the sentence they are attached to.
• A drawer that covers the answer. Cheaper than a navigation, still a context switch, and now the reader cannot compare.
• Marking the document but not the span. The expensive part of checking is locating, and this leaves all of it with the reader.
• Citations to sources the reader cannot open. A link behind a paywall or a permission boundary is a claim that verification exists somewhere else.
• Citations that do not survive copy or export. The claim travels and the evidence does not, which is where most of the damage happens. See record how it was made.

The smallest version worth building

If the source is short, stop linking and quote it. That alone handles a surprising share of cases and costs nothing but a line of layout.

If it is long, make the link land on the span rather than the document — scroll position and a highlight. That is usually a fragment identifier and an anchor, and it converts a receipt into something a reader might actually use.

Related patterns

• Mark what the product vouches for — which claims need evidence at all, before the question of where to put it.
• Answer within the boundary, and show its shape — the case where the source cannot be shown because it was deliberately withheld.
• Make the score answerable — the same move for a number: make checking cheaper than believing.