The Citation Record · §2.1 · one sheet per citation
v0.1 · 7 September 2026 · draft, open for comment, not yet used to produce results
Evaluate every citation against all six classes. Do not stop at the first defect. A single citation may be Class 2 and Class 3, or Class 4 and Class 5.
Class 6 is scored, not inferred. It is the denominator for every rate and the population for false-positive measurement — not a leftover.
Format is not truth. Disregard Bluebook compliance entirely, except where a formatting defect makes the intended authority genuinely ambiguous — then record Unscorable.
The cited authority does not exist. No opinion, statute, or regulation matching the citation can be located in the ground-truth corpus or in any official source, and the parties, court, and disposition described do not correspond to any real matter.
The authority exists and is correctly identified as to substance, but one or more citation elements are wrong: reporter, volume, page, pinpoint page, year, court, or docket number.
| 2a | Pinpoint page only | low — parallel authority still reachable |
| 2b | First page, correct volume and reporter | moderate |
| 2c | Volume or reporter | high — citation does not resolve |
| 2d | Year | moderate — may misrepresent currency |
| 2e | Court or jurisdiction of issuance | high — see also Class 5 |
The authority exists and is correctly cited, but the proposition attributed to it is not supported by the opinion.
| 3a | Fabricated quotation attributed to a real opinion | separately tabulated |
| 3b | Genuine quotation, materially altered | |
| 3c | Dissent, concurrence, or dicta presented as holding | |
| 3d | Holding overstated or narrowed beyond the opinion's terms | |
| 3e | Disposition inverted — case cited for the losing position |
The authority exists, is correctly cited, and the holding is correctly stated, but it has been overruled, abrogated, superseded by statute, vacated, or reversed, and the system presents it as current binding law without qualification.
| 4a | Expressly overruled | |
| 4b | Abrogated in relevant part; remainder good law | |
| 4c | Superseded by statute or rule | |
| 4d | Vacated or reversed on appeal | |
| 4e | Called into doubt without express overruling | reported separately |
The authority exists, is correctly cited, correctly stated, and currently good law, but does not bind the tribunal in which the query situated it, and is presented without accurate qualification as to weight.
| 5a | Out-of-state authority presented as binding | |
| 5b | Federal presented as binding on a state court on a state-law question, or the converse | |
| 5c | Sister-circuit or sister-district authority presented as binding | |
| 5d | Lower-court authority presented as controlling | |
| 5e | Unpublished or non-citable authority presented without its citation restriction |
The authority exists, the citation data is accurate, the attributed proposition is supported, the authority is current, and its weight in the specified jurisdiction is accurately represented or accurately qualified. All five conditions. Requires the absence of Classes 1 through 5.
Mark this box affirmatively when all five hold. Class 6 items are the denominator for every rate in the report and the population against which over-flagging is measured — a verification system that flags a Class 6 authority as unverifiable has failed, and that failure is invisible to any methodology counting only caught errors.
| Authority outside ground-truth coverage | excluded from rates; counted |
| Authority sealed, unpublished, or withdrawn | excluded; counted |
| Citation too malformed to identify intended authority | excluded; counted; noted in system profile |
| Status changed within measurement window | excluded; counted |
| Scorer disagreement unresolved after adjudication | excluded; counted; reported |
Unscorable is not a synonym for correct, and it is not a synonym for fabricated. Treating coverage gaps as fabrications inflates error rates against systems drawing on broader corpora than the ground-truth source.
This rubric is published before it has been used to score anything, so that it can be argued with while changing it still costs nothing. The objections wanted most are from law librarians and practising attorneys, who would be the ones applying it. Write to jb@citationrecord.org.
Worked examples for each class, with the verification record for every citation, are at citationrecord.org/rubric/examples/ — /rubric/examples/.
A demonstration of the interface scorers use, with a sample item and nothing recorded, is at citationrecord.org/rubric/scoring/ — /rubric/scoring/.