How CiteWard verifies every citation

Not a black box. Here's the actual pipeline between your question and the answer you see.

Most medical AI tools answer first and cite second — the citation is decoration on an answer the model already wrote from training data. CiteWard's pipeline runs the other direction: retrieval happens before generation, and the answer is built from what was actually found, not from what the model already believed.

Retrieve before generating

Every question triggers a live search across primary medical sources — PubMed, Europe PMC, ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA drug labels, WHO and CPIC guidance — before any answer is written. CiteWard doesn't answer from memory first and check itself later; the evidence comes first.

Evidence-bound drafting

The answer is drafted from the retrieved evidence, not free-written. Each factual claim is meant to trace back to a specific retrieved source — not just a topic match, but the actual passage that supports it.

Claim-level verification

Before an answer ships, every citation is checked for semantic support against its source, and every high-risk number — a dose, a threshold, a percentage, an odds ratio, a confidence interval — is checked for whether that specific figure actually appears in the cited passage. A source discussing 'increased risk' does not automatically support an exact number. If a number can't be verified, it doesn't get published as a bare fact — the qualitative finding is kept, the unverified figure is not.

Repair, not silent failure

When a claim fails verification, CiteWard doesn't just delete it and move on — deleting a claim can leave a sentence pointing at nothing, or a section that reads as complete while missing the one piece the reader needed. The repair step is deterministic where possible and aims to keep the rest of the answer useful rather than discarding it over one unverified detail.

What this doesn't mean

Verification reduces the rate of unsupported claims — it doesn't make CiteWard a medical provider, and it doesn't replace your own clinical judgment or a check against the primary source yourself. See our Medical Disclaimer. For which databases are actually indexed and how often, see Our Sources.