REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 53 references
Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Citations raise trust in AI chatbot answers even when they are random, while checking them signals distrust.
desk verdict Solid experiment, overstated abstract: the random-citation headline isn't directly tested, but the citation-presence effect and the honest one-vs-five null make it worth referee time. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central machinery is the anti-monitoring theory of trust, paired with the Principle of Social Proof: trust is inferred from a reduction in surveillance, and citations act as visible endorsements that substitute for direct verification. The experiment operationalizes the theory by treating a mouse hover over a citation numeral as a monitoring event and a 1–10 rating as stated trust, then regressing trust on citation presence, citation relevance, and hover behavior while controlling for demographics. The load-bearing identity is the negative correlation between checking and trust: if hover frequency did not predict lower ratings, the anti-monitoring interpretation would lose its empirical support.
What would settle it
A replication that requires participants to click a citation to see the URL, and records click counts and dwell time instead of hovers, would test the anti-monitoring account: if click-based checking shows no negative relationship with trust, or if accidental hovers alone reproduce the effect, the claim that checking indicates lower trust would be falsified.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
On the paper's own terms, the discovery is that trust in LLM-generated answers is driven more by the presence of a citation than by its quality: a randomized controlled trial with zero, one, or five citations, valid or random, found that 'has citation' significantly increased trust ratings, 'random citation' significantly decreased them relative to valid ones, and one versus five citations made no significant difference. A separate regression found that each citation check (mouse hover) was associated with significantly lower reported trust, and random citations that were checked lost the trust advantage entirely, being rated no better than answers with no citations. The authors interpret this asymmetry through trust as anti-monitoring: citations provide social proof that raises trust, while monitoring the citations indicates that trust is absent.
Load-bearing premise
The load-bearing assumption is that a mouse hover over a citation numeral counts as 'checking' the citation: hovering is effortless, can be accidental, and was not validated against deliberate inspection, yet the anti-monitoring conclusion depends entirely on that equation.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Answers with any citation tend to be rated more trustworthy than identical answers with no citation, even when the cited sources are unrelated to the answer.
- A single citation is as effective as five, so increasing citation count beyond one is unlikely to buy additional trust.
- Users who inspect citations report lower trust, and random citations that get inspected lose their trust advantage, suggesting that checking neutralizes the social-proof effect.
- Question content shifts trust: political and factual questions receive higher trust ratings, while more complex or longer prompts receive slightly lower ratings.
Reading between the lines
- An implication the authors do not draw: if random citations raise trust, then citations are functioning as a credibility cue rather than as verifiable evidence, which makes fabricated citations a direct trust-exploitation risk in deployed systems.
- The one-versus-five null suggests users apply a binary 'is there a source' heuristic; a natural extension is to test whether citation count interacts with perceived source authority or domain risk.
- Because hover conflates suspicion with curiosity, a click-to-reveal design would test whether the anti-monitoring result reflects distrust or mere exploration; it is a testable boundary condition on the paper's central claim.
- The result that checked random citations lose the trust premium implies that transparency tools that surface citations may actually lower trust if the sources are weak, challenging the assumption that more transparency is always better.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This paper reports a between-subjects randomized experiment (N=303; roughly 3,040 question-level ratings) in which participants asked a custom ChatGPT-based QA system ten questions and rated their trust in each answer. The system varied the number of citations (0, 1, or 5) and, for non-zero conditions, whether the citations were relevant to the answer or randomly drawn from previous participants' queries. The paper reports that citations increase self-reported trust, that random citations are rated lower than valid ones, that one and five citations do not differ, and that participants who hover over citations give lower trust ratings, which the authors interpret as support for trust-as-anti-monitoring. Additional exploratory analyses consider question type, demographics, and prompt perplexity.
Significance. If the presence-of-citations effect is robust, this is a useful empirical contribution to the literature on trust in LLM-generated content. The study's strengths include a live question-answering task with real user-generated questions, an experimental manipulation of citation count and relevance, and public availability of the data and Stata code. However, the headline claim that the trust increase 'held true even when the citations were random' is not supported by any direct statistical contrast in the reported analyses, the reported standard errors likely ignore participant-level clustering of repeated ratings, and the 'checking' measure is a mouse hover rather than a validated deliberate inspection. These issues are fixable with additional analyses and wording changes, but they currently limit the strength of the central conclusions.
major comments (3)
- [Abstract; Results, 'Does the Quality of Citation Matter?'; Table S2] The abstract and introduction claim that the trust increase 'held true even when the citations were random' (Abstract; Introduction). I could not find a direct test of random citations versus no citations. In Table S2, 'Has Citation' and 'Citation Random' enter the same model; the coefficient on 'Citation Random' (-0.268, SE 0.087) contrasts random with valid citations, not random with zero citations, because the zero-citation group is the omitted baseline for 'Has Citation'. To support the headline claim, report the joint contrast (Has Citation + Citation Random) with its standard error and p-value, or run an explicit random-versus-zero model on the full sample. The only direct comparison in the main text, in 'Does Checking Citations Indicate a Reduction in User Trust?', is restricted to the 193 checked questions and is nonsignificant (T=-0.877, p=0.38); this does not test the full-sample claim and in fact trends in the opposite direction.
- [Results, Tables S2, S3, and S4] The regressions and ANOVA treat the roughly 3,040 question-level ratings as independent observations, but each of the 303 participants contributes ten ratings in a single session. The between-subjects assignment of citation condition does not make these repeated ratings independent. The reported standard errors (e.g., Has Citation β=0.394, SE=0.0906 in Table S2) are therefore likely understated, and the p-values for the main effects may be too small. Please re-estimate the main models with cluster-robust standard errors at the participant level or with participant random effects, and report whether the presence-of-citations and checking effects remain significant.
- [Methodology; Results, 'Does Checking Citations Indicate a Reduction in User Trust?'; Table S4] The operational measure of 'checking' a citation is a mouse hover over the citation numeral, which reveals the URL but requires no click. The anti-monitoring conclusion ('checking citations decrease perceived trust') rests on treating hover as deliberate monitoring. Because hovers can be accidental or cursory, please validate the measure (e.g., click-through, dwell time, or a sensitivity analysis excluding very short hovers) or soften the claim to what the data support. In addition, Table S4 models Citation Checks as a function of Trust, so the data are consistent with lower trust leading to checking rather than checking causing lower trust; the abstract's phrasing 'decrease in self-reported user trust when participants checked the citations' should be revised to describe the associational direction actually tested.
minor comments (5)
- [Throughout] The model name 'ChatGPT4' should be 'ChatGPT-4' or 'GPT-4' for consistency with the cited technical report.
- [Results, 'Do Citations Increase User Trust?'] The first sentence contains a typo: 'In out initial analysis' should read 'In our initial analysis'.
- [Figures 2 and 4] The labels 'Participants Demographics SurveyResponse' (Fig. 2) and 'T rust' (Fig. 4) should be corrected for readability.
- [Supplement, 'Question Order, Citation Checking, and Trust'] The text says 'as illustrated in Table 6' but the item is a figure (Fig. 6); the cross-reference should be fixed.
- [Figure 3 caption] The caption states 'random citations decrease perceived trustworthiness'; this is only a decrease relative to valid citations, not relative to zero citations. Please state the reference category explicitly in the caption.
Circularity Check
No circularity: the trust and citation-checking claims are tested against independently collected behavioral data, not derived from the paper's own assumptions.
full rationale
This paper is an empirical randomized controlled trial, not a derivation. The hypotheses (citations increase trust; checking citations indicates lower trust) are operationalized through self-reported trust ratings and mouse-hover citation checks, and are then tested statistically against newly collected participant data. There is no equation in which a predicted quantity is constructed from the fitted inputs: the regression coefficients in Tables S2, S4, and S6 are estimates from data, not definitions, and the anti-monitoring framework is used only to motivate directional hypotheses rather than to compute trust values. No load-bearing self-citation appears: the one citation to the authors' prior work (Poudel and Weninger 2024) concerns question framing and does not establish any premise of the present experiment. The abstract's statement that the trust increase 'held true even when the citations were random' may be under-supported by the reported contrasts, but that is a statistical-evidence concern, not circularity, because the claim is not equivalent by construction to any fitted parameter or definition. The measuring of 'checking' as a hover over a citation numeral is a construct-validity limitation, not a circular reduction. Accordingly, no circular step is identifiable and the paper should be scored as non-circular.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption A one-item slider from 1 to 10 measures user trust in the answer.
- domain assumption Mouse hover over a citation numeral operationalizes checking a citation.
- domain assumption Prolific participants are representative enough to generalize trust effects.
- domain assumption ChatGPT4 and Google search results are stable across the experiment.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/4I36WYLW
@misc{pith2026250101303,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/4I36WYLW}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2501.01303}
}
read the original abstract
Question answering systems are rapidly advancing, but their opaque nature may impact user trust. We explored trust through an anti-monitoring framework, where trust is predicted to be correlated with presence of citations and inversely related to checking citations. We tested this hypothesis with a live question-answering experiment that presented text responses generated using a commercial Chatbot along with varying citations (zero, one, or five), both relevant and random, and recorded if participants checked the citations and their self-reported trust in the generated responses. We found a significant increase in trust when citations were present, a result that held true even when the citations were random; we also found a significant decrease in trust when participants checked the citations. These results highlight the importance of citations in enhancing trust in AI-generated content.
Figures
Figures from the paper (4 more)
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 10, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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