Citation discipline.

The contract Forum Atlas makes with every reader: every analytical claim ties back to a verbatim substring in a retrieved source chunk. No anonymous synthesis. No paraphrase-as-fact. No fabricated citations.

The matcher

The validator normalizes whitespace, then runs a substring-containment check between the model's quoted excerpt and the retrieved chunk text. Case sensitivity is preserved. Punctuation is preserved. $1.2B doesn't match $1.2 billion. The model is expected to quote source text exactly.

The fallback

When the validator's second-pass also fails, the brief is persisted with confidence=insufficient_evidence and the failed paragraph renders as “Insufficient evidence on [topic].” in place of the synthesized prose. The brief still delivers — the user sees what was verifiable plus the explicit gap, not a fabrication.

The bibliography

Every brief exposes a bibliography endpoint at /api/briefs/{brief_id}/bibliography?style=... with APA / MLA / Chicago / Harvard formatting. Compliance-grade exports go through this endpoint, not the inline citation pills — the bibliography reads from the append-only canonical rows.