CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.15164 (cs)
[Submitted on 14 Sep 2026]
Title:CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search
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Abstract:When several retrieved sources support the same claim, an answer engine cites some but not others. We call this decision citation allocation and introduce CITECHOICE, a causal audit of authentic multi-turn agentic search. From 129 everyday-query transcripts, CITECHOICE selects 113 same-call document pairs with independently verified support for the same pre-specified fact, without observing ranks or answer outcomes; blinded human review confirms 103. It runs a hash-verified 2-by-2 replay crossing pair order with jointly generated, fidelity-checked structured and prose renderings of one target while the rest of the transcript remains fixed.
Three results emerge. First, and most importantly, structured rendering concentrates citation credit rather than clearly increasing source admission. It raises target citation count by +0.50 citations per answer (95 percent CI [+0.20, +0.84]; Holm-adjusted p=.033), without increasing total citations or reducing competitor credit. The pre-specified incidence effect (whether the target is cited at all) is +4.5 percentage points and inconclusive (95 percent CI [-1.4, +10.4]; p=.168). Second, observational position differences exceed controlled reordering effects: the citation-rate gap between rank 1 and rank 5 is 42.3 percentage points, compared with +7.9 percentage points in the main replay and 0.0 percentage points held out. Third, citation evaluation has a measurable noise floor. Although the aggregate count effect repeats under fresh decoding of 30 frozen families, 15 percent of binary decisions change and decoding accounts for an estimated 45 percent of single-generation family-effect variance. Together, these findings isolate what survives control: presentation can causally redistribute visible citation credit within frozen transcripts. They do not establish reliable source admission, a pure formatting mechanism, or a general rank advantage.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.15164 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.15164v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15164
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search, by Sriram Selvam and 1 other authors
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