Citations

Claude Citations Feature: Key Concepts

• Purpose: The citations feature addresses the common issue of users having to take the model's interpretation of PDF content on faith. It provides verifiable evidence for the model's statements.
• Mechanism:
• To enable citations, the document dictionary must include the field citations enabled true.
• The response generated by Claude contains multiple parts: plain text parts and dedicated citation content parts.
• Functionality:
• Citations act as references (like footnotes) within the generated response.
• When a citation is present, it tells the user exactly where the supporting information was found in the source PDF (e. g. , "page four").
• This allows users to verify the information by cross-referencing the statement with the original PDF.
• Benefit: The primary value of this feature is increasing user confidence in the answers generated by Claude.