Sources
What CiteWard actually retrieves from
Every one of these is queried live, not baked into a static training set. Here's the list, and what each one is actually for.
PubMed
The National Library of Medicine's index of biomedical literature — the primary source for peer-reviewed articles, trials, and reviews.
Europe PMC
A complementary literature index with broader open-access full-text coverage, queried alongside PubMed.
ClinicalTrials.gov
Registered trial protocols and results — used to check whether a claimed study actually exists and what it found, not just what a claim implies about it.
FDA drug labels (via DailyMed)
Official prescribing information — indications, dosing, contraindications, interactions — as the authoritative source for regulator-approved drug information.
WHO guidance
World Health Organization guidelines, used for global public-health and clinical recommendations.
CPIC
The Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium — gene-drug interaction guidance for pharmacogenomics questions.
OpenAlex
A broader scholarly index used to widen literature coverage beyond biomedical-specific databases when a question needs it.
How a source gets used
A source appearing in a search result isn't treated as proof it supports the answer. Each candidate passage is checked for whether it actually addresses the specific question and claim being made — a document being topically related isn't the same as a document supporting a specific number or recommendation. See our methodology for how that verification works.
Currency
Guidance changes. Where a retrieved source is old enough that it may have been superseded, that's a signal CiteWard weighs — a newer authoritative source is preferred over an older one when both are found, and the answer says so when it matters.