--- name: reading-contract description: Sources-only discipline for any instrument or agent that reads documents and asserts facts from them — literature audits, record replays, data extraction, citation of prior work. --- # reading-contract — assert only what the record supports **THE CONTRACT: an instrument that reads documents asserts only what the record in front of it supports, with the citation attached at the level of page, table, equation, or line. Everything else it emits is labeled as what it actually is — memory, inference, or absence. A reading report that cannot be spot-checked in one look, claim by claim, is not a reading report; it is an essay dressed as one.** The reason this needs a contract at all: a language model reading documents fills gaps fluently and invisibly. It has seen thousands of papers shaped like the one in front of it, and it will supply the number the paper "should" contain, the conclusion such papers "usually" draw, the attribution the result "sounds like" — in the same confident register as genuine extraction, with a plausible section number attached. The failure is undetectable from the output's style, which is precisely what makes it lethal: the only defense is structural. Every claim carries a locator; every locator gets opened; every quote is checked against the source bytes. Where that discipline lapses, reading silently becomes remembering, and remembering becomes inventing. ## The procedure **1. Open the actual record.** "Read" means the source bytes are in front of the instrument in this session — not a recollection of the title, not a secondary account, not an abstract standing in for the body. If the source cannot be opened, the honest output is "not checked," stated as such. An answer from memory dressed in a citation is worse than no answer, because it poisons every later check that trusts the citation. **2. Extract with locators.** Every asserted fact carries its source plus a locator precise enough that a checker lands on the sentence: page, table row, equation number, figure panel. A claim you cannot point to is not extracted yet — go back and find it, or downgrade it to a labeled inference. Record which version of the source the locator refers to (preprint versus published; edition; revision date): locators rot when versions shift, and a broken locator quietly breaks the entire audit trail behind it. **3. Quote before paraphrase for load-bearing claims.** When an assertion will carry weight in later work, carry the verbatim sentence next to the paraphrase, copied from the source text — never re-typed from memory, which is where drift enters. The check on the claim is then one look instead of a search. Quotation marks are a legal instrument: they promise the string occurs literally in the source. A fair paraphrase inside quotation marks is a fabrication, however faithful its content. **4. Preserve the hedge at source strength.** "Consistent with" is not "confirms"; "suggests" is not "shows"; a conjecture in the source stays a conjecture in your note. The modal is part of the claim. Restatements are checked against the carried quote, never against the previous restatement — chains of summaries strengthen monotonically, one fair-sounding notch at a time, until the source is credited with a result it explicitly declined to claim. **5. Classify outcomes honestly.** When checking a published value against its own stated inputs, there are exactly four honest outcomes: it *reproduces*; it is *determined only under conventions the record does not state* (name the assumed convention); it is *undetermined* by what the record provides; or it is *uncheckable* with what you have. "Probably meant" is not an outcome. A mismatch you can erase by guessing a normalization is not a reproduction — it is the second category, reported as the second category. **6. Scope every attribution.** A claim belongs to the sentence's actual author at the sentence's actual strength. One paper is not the field; the boldest sentence in one introduction is not a consensus. "It is known that" requires either a source that says so or deletion. Absence claims scope to the search performed: "these records do not state X" is assertable after actually searching them; "the literature contains no X" is a claim about a search you must be able to describe. **7. Type retrieval as retrieval.** A result found in a source during reading is recorded as retrieved, with the source — never re-presented as something derived here. This holds even when you could have derived it: the provenance of *how you actually got it* is the fact being recorded. A value copied from a table and later "independently confirmed" against that same table is a copy agreeing with itself. Never claim independent derivation of a published result. **8. Verify bibliographic identity.** Authors, title, venue, year, identifier — checked against the canonical databases before the entry is cited, not copied from a previous citer. Folklore errors propagate precisely because each citer trusts the one before; the chain breaks only where someone opens the record. **9. Separate the layers in the report.** Three bins, visibly labeled: *read* (facts with locators, quotes verified); *inferred* (labeled, resting on named read facts); *background* (memory, unverified — quarantined, and either verified against a source before use or excluded from anything that carries weight). A report that mixes the bins forces every reader to re-do the reading to find out which sentences are load-bearing. ## Failure-mode catalogue The classes this contract exists to catch. Each reads fluently; none survives opening the source. - **Memory dressed as reading.** The report cites a section for a claim the instrument pulled from its recollection of similar papers; the section, opened, says something narrower, later, or nothing of the kind. - **Paraphrase drift.** Each restatement strengthens the hedge one notch — consistent-with becomes finds becomes establishes — and the final summary credits the source with a claim it explicitly avoided. - **The phantom quote.** Quotation marks around a fair-sounding paraphrase; the string occurs nowhere in the source, and the marks convert a summary into manufactured evidence. - **Abstract-for-body citation.** The abstract's headline is cited for a quantitative claim that lives only in the body, under assumptions the abstract omits — or that appears nowhere in the paper at all. - **One-paper-to-field promotion.** A single group's statement becomes "the field believes"; a second source would refute the consensus being invented. - **Secondary-source laundering.** A review's summary of a paper is extracted and cited as the paper itself; the review's simplification now travels with the original's authority. - **Convention smuggling.** A published value "fails to reproduce" because the reader silently assumed a normalization or sign convention the record never states — the honest outcome was "determined only under unstated conventions," not "wrong." - **Locator rot.** The claim is genuine but the pointer is to a different version — equations renumbered between preprint and journal — so every later checker fails to verify and the trail dies silently. - **Negative claim without a search.** "Not addressed in the literature" asserted after reading three papers; the claim's true scope was those three papers and the one query that found them. - **Retrieval passed as derivation.** A value found in a table during the reading pass is later presented as computed here, and its "independent confirmation" is its own reference. - **Version skew.** A claim read in the preprint is attributed to the published version, and the two differ at exactly the sentence in question. - **Bibliography folklore.** Year, author list, or venue copied from a previous citer's error and propagated, because nobody in the chain ever opened the canonical record. ## Worked micro-example: the drift chain Source sentence: *"our results are consistent with a vanishing correction."* - Note, first pass: "they find the correction consistent with zero." — fair. - Second pass, summarizing the note: "they find no correction." — a claim the authors did not make. - Third pass, citing the summary: "it is known that the correction vanishes." — folklore, three steps from birth, each step a fair-sounding summary of the one before. Only the first restatement is a fair summary *of the source*. The cure is mechanical, not moral: the verbatim quote travels with the claim, and every restatement is checked against the quote. The chain cannot drift when every link is forged against the same original. ## Worked micro-example: the extraction record The format that makes spot-checking one look instead of an afternoon: ``` CLAIM: the second-order coefficient is given in closed form SOURCE: [Author, Year], published version, Eq. (3.12), p. 9 VERBATIM: "the coefficient at second order reduces to [expression]" (copied from the source text, not re-typed) STATUS: read — quote verified against source ``` and, kept visibly apart from it: ``` BACKGROUND (memory, unverified): expansions of this type typically converge inside the unit disk. Not asserted; verify before use. ``` The second block is not a weakness in the report — it is the report being honest about which of its sentences were read and which were remembered. The failure is not having background knowledge; the failure is letting it wear a locator. ## Closing checklist Before a reading report ships: - [ ] Every asserted fact carries source plus locator (page / table / equation / line), with the source version identified. - [ ] Every locator was verified by opening the record in this session — none inherited from memory or a previous citer. - [ ] Load-bearing claims carry verbatim quotes copied from the source bytes; every quotation-marked string literally occurs in the source. - [ ] Hedges preserved at source strength; restatements checked against the quote, not against earlier restatements. - [ ] Every check outcome is one of: reproduces / determined only under unstated conventions / undetermined / uncheckable — no "probably meant." - [ ] Attributions scoped to the actual author and paper; no one-paper claims promoted to the field. - [ ] Abstracts cited only for what the abstract itself supports. - [ ] Negative claims scoped to the records actually searched, with the search describable. - [ ] Everything retrieved is typed as retrieval; no found result is presented as derived here. - [ ] Read / inferred / background layers visibly separated; background is quarantined from anything that carries weight. - [ ] Bibliographic identity of every cited entry checked against a canonical database, not a previous citer. The test of the whole report: hand it to a skeptic with the sources open. If any sentence sends them searching rather than looking, the contract was not met for that sentence.