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What is VeriCite

concept

VeriCite gives institutions trusted answers with citations to approved source material.

VeriCite answers questions for your Workspace — the isolated environment that holds your institution's approved source material — using only that material. When someone asks a question, the Assistant returns an answer drawn from those sources, and every answer carries Citations back to the documents it came from. You see not just what the Assistant said, but where it got it.

What VeriCite is

VeriCite is a trusted-answer system: a retrieval-grounded Assistant that answers strictly from the source material you have approved in your Workspace. It does not draw on general world knowledge, and it does not fill gaps with plausible-sounding text. For each question it retrieves the relevant passages from your approved sources, composes an answer from them, and attaches Citations so the answer can be traced and verified against the original documents.

When the sources are silent, the Assistant stopsIf your approved sources do not support an answer, the Assistant does not guess. It escalates the question to a human instead. Knowing when not to answer is a core part of how VeriCite stays trustworthy.

Why it matters

Institutions cannot stand behind an answer they cannot trace. By grounding every response in approved material and attaching Citations, VeriCite lets you verify any answer against its source — and lets the people you serve do the same. Two properties make this work in practice:

  • Answers are bounded to approved sources, so the Assistant never substitutes general knowledge for your institution's material.
  • Unsupported questions are escalated to a human rather than answered speculatively, so a missing source produces a hand-off, not a confident-sounding error.

How it relates to other concepts

Two concepts carry most of VeriCite's weight. Citations are how an answer earns trust: they are part of the answer itself, pointing back to the exact approved sources it was built from. Escalation is the other half: when those sources do not support an answer, the question is handed to a human expert in your Workspace instead of being answered. Together they define the contract — answer from sources with Citations, or escalate.

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