Evidence Ledger Research

Evidence Ledger Research

Use this skill when the answer must be tied to exact evidence rather than memory or broad summaries.

Source Discipline

• Prefer primary sources, official data pages, original PDFs, repository files, or provided/oracle documents.
• If a guessed exact-date search fails, broaden to the official series, table name, dataset code, or download page.
• Read only the narrow span needed after locating a promising source, then verify entity, period, basis, unit, and version.
• If a provided document contains the answer, extract from it before searching elsewhere.
• For volatile facts, verify the latest source before answering.
• If evaluating Doc-to-LoRA or another document-memory method, pair this with doc-to-lora-evaluator and keep the baseline questions, source answers, and negative controls in the ledger.

Evidence Ledger

Maintain a compact ledger for multi-step answers:

Claim/operand:
Source:
Date/period:
Unit/scale:
Role:
Value/span:
Notes:

Use the ledger before arithmetic, comparisons, ranking, or final formatting. Do not compute from partial evidence unless the user explicitly accepts an estimate.

Table And Document Rules

• Match row labels and exact column headers, not visual proximity alone.
• Watch for repeated month rows, fiscal vs calendar sections, continuation tables, estimates, totals, and footnotes.
• For forms and PDFs, locate the exact field/anchor in the question, then read the adjacent filled value from the same row, box, block, or table cell.
• For visual/document QA, prefer the smallest exact text span that answers the question.
• Preserve spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and numeric formatting when exact extraction matters.

Calculation Rules

• Confirm every operand before calculating.
• Track scale and direction: thousands/millions/billions, currency, exchange-rate orientation, sign, percent vs percentage points.
• Preserve relation direction: "change from A to B" means B - A; "share accounted for by X" means X / total.
• For time windows, enumerate expected periods first and verify endpoint inclusion.
• Do not round intermediate values unless the source requires it.

Final Answer

• Match the requested format exactly: option label, numeric value, list, date, or concise phrase.
• Include unit words only when requested or necessary for clarity.
• When citing sources, link the source and summarize the evidence without long quotations.
• Copy the final answer from the checked ledger value, not from an unverified intermediate.