Citation
A citation is an explicit pointer from a claim to the source that supports it. Citations let readers verify claims, give credit to contributors, and let later corrections propagate backward to every document that inherited a source.
A citation is a structured reference from a claim to the source that supports it — a book, paper, dataset, interview, web page, or other evidence. Citations carry three loads at once: they let a reader independently verify the claim by going to the source, they assign credit to the author of the cited work, and they create an audit trail that lets later corrections flow backward through every document that inherited a now-disputed fact. Citation conventions vary by domain — academic styles such as APA, MLA, and Chicago; the inline footnote tradition of historical writing; the hyperlinked reference list in Wikipedia; named-source attribution in journalism — but the underlying function is the same: a claim without a citation is, structurally, a claim that cannot be checked. Citations also encode the social fabric of a field: who reads whom, which sources are treated as authoritative, and which claims are still considered contested. See Citation Cartel: Self-Citation Padding in Academic Papers for a failure mode in which citation networks are gamed for prestige rather than used to support claims.