Citations Grounded Answers

Instructions

Use this skill to design an application workflow that answers questions or summarizes documents with verifiable citations.

1. Define the job and citation expectations

• What tasks: summarization, complex Q&A, customer support?
• What needs a citation: every bullet, every paragraph, or only factual claims?

2. Prepare sources

• Collect PDFs and/or plain text relevant to the user request.
• Decide whether to rely on the platform’s sentence chunking or provide your own pre-chunked text.

3. Prompt for grounded outputs

• Ask for concise answers and require citations alongside claims.
• Instruct the model to avoid unsupported claims and to say “not found in sources” when needed.

4. UX: make citations legible

• Choose how to display citations (inline markers, footnotes, expandable source snippets).
• Let users jump to the cited passage.

5. Evaluate and iterate

• Sample real user queries.
• Check recall (are key claims cited) and precision (are citations relevant).
• Track failure modes: missing citations, irrelevant citations, over-quoting.

Examples

See examples in:

• examples/grounded-qa.md

Source

• https://claude.com/blog/introducing-citations-api