Overview
Citation
Source attribution with relevance scores for AI-generated content
sourcesreferencestrust
Props
| Prop | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
citations | CitationItem[] | required | Array of citation items with id, source, url, snippet, and relevance score |
title | string | undefined | Heading text above the citations list |
maxVisible | number | undefined | Maximum citations to show before a "show more" toggle |
Docs
Citations connect an AI-generated response back to its underlying source material — whether that's a PDF, a web page, a transcript, or an internal knowledge base. By surfacing where information comes from, they let users verify claims, explore primary sources, and judge the reliability of the output. This is especially important because AI summaries can contain inaccuracies or misrepresentations; inline references give users a quick path to the truth rather than forcing blind trust.
Variants
- Inline highlights — Linked annotations within the response text that point to specific passages in attached or referenced documents.
- Direct quotations — Exact quotes pulled from the source material, displayed alongside or within the generated summary.
- Multi-source references — Grouped references with metadata such as titles, favicons, and relevance indicators, enabling quick scanning across multiple sources.
- Lightweight links — Simple URL references that prioritize transparency and verifiability over visual polish.
Use Cases
- Research assistants that synthesize information from multiple sources
- Enterprise knowledge bases where accuracy is critical
- Legal or medical tools that require traceable references
- Content summarization where users need to fact-check claims
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines surfacing retrieved documents
Best Practices
- Match citation granularity to the claim: factual statements need exact passages, while discovery-oriented content can use broader references.
- Position citations where users naturally expect them — inline for sentence-level claims, in a side panel for exploratory browsing.
- Provide hover or click previews that show the relevant excerpt without requiring a full navigation away from the response.
- Explicitly surface when a source is unavailable or could not be retrieved rather than silently dropping the reference.
- Allow users to re-scope or filter references without regenerating the entire response.