{
  "id": "citation-generation",
  "code": "PTL-0139",
  "term": "Citation Generation",
  "aliases": [
    "attributed generation",
    "source attribution",
    "grounded citations"
  ],
  "category": "retrieval-tools",
  "definition": "Citation generation is having a model attach citations to the sources that support each claim in its answer, so readers can verify the answer and unsupported claims are easier to spot.",
  "description": "Citations are usually drawn from retrieved documents or search results, and some APIs return them as structured spans pointing into the source. Evaluations have found that models often cite sources that do not fully support the sentence they are attached to, so citation quality, both recall and precision, needs to be measured rather than assumed.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "retrieval-augmented-generation",
    "web-search-tool",
    "hallucination"
  ],
  "introduced": 2023,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations",
      "authors": "Gao et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14627"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/citation-generation/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Citation Generation. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0139). https://protologue.com/t/citation-generation/"
}