What Is SVRIS? The Open Standard for Citation Verification

SVRIS (SourceVerify Reference Identity Standard) is an open, deterministic standard for verifying whether academic and professional citations refer to real publications. Unlike black-box AI systems that simply output "verified" or "not verified," SVRIS provides transparent, auditable results that can be independently reproduced.

SVRIS was developed to solve a fundamental problem with citation verification: how do you know if the verification is correct? With traditional approaches, you get a binary answer with no explanation. SVRIS shows you exactly which fields matched, which didn't, and why the final classification was made.

The Five Field Labels

When SVRIS compares a citation to a candidate document, each metadata field (title, authors, year, venue, identifier) receives one of five labels:

• MATCH — The citation and document fields are identical after normalization
• CONTAINS — Partial match (substring or valid abbreviation)
• ABSENT — The citation doesn't include this field
• UNCONFIRMED — The citation claims a value, but evidence neither confirms nor contradicts it
• CONTRADICTION — Evidence shows a different value than the citation claims

The Four Classification Outcomes

Based on the field labels, SVRIS produces one of four deterministic outcomes:

• VERIFIED — Strong evidence confirms the citation refers to a real document (title or DOI match plus strong corroboration)
• VERIFIED WITH ERRORS — The document exists but the citation has minor issues
• NEEDS HUMAN REVIEW — Ambiguous evidence requires expert judgment
• UNVERIFIED — No matching document found or too many contradictions

Why SVRIS Matters

SVRIS is built on five core principles:

1. Determinism — Identical inputs always yield identical outputs
2. Auditability — Every outcome can be manually verified
3. Inference-Free Operation — No semantic or probabilistic reasoning
4. Safety — Ambiguous citations are never misclassified
5. Generality — Works across all fields and source types

For researchers, publishers, and anyone working with AI-generated content, SVRIS provides a reliable way to verify citations without trusting a black box. Learn more about SVRIS or read the full specification.

Summary

SVRIS is an open standard for citation verification that replaces opaque AI verdicts with transparent, reproducible classifications. By breaking verification into labeled field comparisons and deterministic rules, SourceVerify provides verification you can actually trust and audit.