Cite Check

Citations get repeated. A reviewer quotes a section, a consultant repeats it in a report, it goes into a drawing note, and two years later nobody can say which edition it came from or whether the text ever said that. Most of them are fine. The ones that are not are expensive and they look identical.

Workflow

Step 1. Take the citation exactly as given, and separate the claim

Ask, in one message:

1. The citation, verbatim, including the edition or year if one was stated.
2. Who gave it, in what document, and on what date?
3. What is it being used to prove? Write that as a sentence separate from the citation itself.
4. Do you have the document, or a published source for it?
5. Which jurisdiction, and what edition does it adopt? Point at jurisdiction-profile.

Question 3 is the whole exercise. A citation and a claim are two things, and a real section is routinely attached to a claim it does not support.

Step 2. Check the document

• Does the document exist under that name?
• Which edition, and is it the one this jurisdiction adopts? Local amendments are part of the answer and they are the part most often missed.
• Was the edition stated at all? An unstated edition is a finding, because section numbers move between editions and the same number is a different requirement.
• Is it a code, a referenced standard, or a guideline? A guideline quoted as though it binds is a common and quiet error.

Step 3. Check the section

• Does that number resolve inside that document?
• Does it resolve to a section about the subject at hand, or has a number been transposed?
• Is the number complete, or is a subsection missing that changes it?
• If it is a referenced standard, does the code actually reference that edition of it?

Step 4. Check the claim against the text

Only with the text in hand. Quote the operative sentence, then set it beside the claim from Step 1:

Claim	what it is being used to prove
Text says	the operative sentence, verbatim
Supports it?	fully / partly / no / cannot tell

partly is the most common answer and the most useful one. A clause that supports half a claim is not a clause that supports the claim, and saying so is more useful than a verdict.

Read the exceptions. A requirement quoted without its exceptions is the single most common way a real citation misleads, and the exception is usually the sentence after the one that got quoted.

Step 5. Report as three answers, not one

Question	Answer	How it was verified
Does the document exist, in which edition
Does the section resolve
Does the text support the claim

Then:

• What could not be verified, and what would verify it.
• Whether the edition question is open.
• Any exception or qualifier in the text that the citation left out.
• If the claim is not supported, the sentence that would have supported it, if there is one elsewhere in what you were given.

Never report a single verdict. A citation can be a real section of the right document and still not say what it is being used to say, and that is a different conversation from a wrong section number.

Step 6. Save, if asked

Ask whether to write the check to a file and where. Where the citation came from a reviewer or a claim, keep it.

Rules

• Never verify from memory. The document, the publisher, or not verified.
• A search result that is not the publisher is not verification.
• Separate the claim from the citation in Step 1, always.
• Answer the three questions separately and report them separately.
• Read the exceptions and report any the citation omitted.
• cannot verify and wrong are different findings and are never merged.
• Ask which edition the jurisdiction adopts, every run.

Anti-patterns

• Confirming a section number from recall because it looks familiar.
• Treating a code aggregator site as the publisher.
• Reporting yes or no.
• Checking the section and not the claim.
• Quoting the requirement and not the exception under it.
• Ignoring the edition because the number resolves in the one you have.
• Calling an unverifiable citation wrong.

Resources

None. This skill is one file. Output is written directly at the path you choose.