Verifiable bibliography

How can you use AI to prepare references for which every source can be located and checked?

1250 € per session, excl. VAT

In short

In a half-day session of 3 hours you use AI to explore a topic, organise references and harmonise their presentation. You then check each entry against a source that can be consulted, distinguish existence from relevance, and deliver a bibliography accompanied by a verification log and quality indicators.

Why this training?

A plausible reference may point to a non-existent article, attribute a text to the wrong author or link a title to an incorrect identifier. A polished presentation therefore proves neither that the document exists nor that it is relevant to the question being studied. AI helps formulate search queries and structure bibliographic entries, but its suggestions remain leads. The training explicitly separates suggestion, consultation and validation to make bibliographic choices traceable and uncertainties visible. Running case study: The fictitious association Avelune Lecture is preparing a briefing note on reading on screens among adults. It has eight candidate references, some of which are deliberately incomplete or incorrect. Participants must select five sources that have been located and are relevant, documenting exclusions and replacements. Application at work: During your next literature search, reuse the log for five references. Measure the proportion of complete entries and sources actually consulted, then correct any discrepancies before circulation.

Objectives of this training

  • Define a literature search question and its selection criteria.
  • Formulate exploratory search queries with the help of AI.
  • Verify the existence and metadata of each selected reference.
  • Harmonise entries according to a shared bibliographic convention.
  • Calculate completeness and verification indicators.

Who is it for and what are the prerequisites?

Roles and tasks concerned

  • Information monitoring or documentation officers preparing source-backed dossiers.
  • Writers, assistants and staff producing briefing notes with references.

Prior skills

  • Have previously written a few simple prompts in an AI assistant.
  • Be able to search for a document online and distinguish between author, title and publisher.

What you will work on

  1. Defining the search scope

    Objective: Turn the need into selection criteria. Literature search question, population studied, period, languages and publication types; distinction between a primary source and commentary.

  2. Locating the documents

    Objective: Distinguish a plausible suggestion from an existing reference. Searching by title and author; checking against a catalogue, repository or publisher’s page; DOI and URL as access points, not as sufficient evidence.

  3. Selecting and standardising

    Objective: Produce consistent entries without artificially filling gaps. Relevance, duplicates, document version, mandatory fields by source type; limitations of reading only the abstract.

  4. Auditing before circulation

    Objective: Measure quality and correct remaining anomalies. Completeness of entries, proportion of sources consulted, traceability of exclusions; difference between existence, accessibility and evidential value.

What you take away

  • Scope sheet and literature search queries.
  • Harmonised bibliography of five selected references.
  • Verification log with evidence and decisions.
  • Completed quality checklist and prioritised corrections.

Method and assessment

  • Short teaching inputs followed by immediate practice using the running case study.
  • Individual work followed by work in pairs, with peer review of the outputs.
  • Guided group discussion: what works, what needs correcting and what remains a human decision.
  • Preparation: Arrange access to the tools authorised by the organisation and the available documentary resources. Prepare a fictitious or anonymised training dossier, with candidate references, accessible documents and a citation convention.

Observable criteria: Each selected reference has consultable evidence of its existence. ; The essential metadata match the checking source. ; Each selection is justified in relation to the literature search question. ; Entries follow a single convention, with no invented metadata. ; Completeness and consultation rates are calculated with an explicit denominator..

Frequently asked questions

Can AI provide the final references directly?

Its suggestions remain candidates until they have been verified in a documentary resource that can be consulted.

What should you do if the full text is inaccessible?

Verify the entry, flag the limited access and do not attribute conclusions to the document that you have not consulted.

Which bibliographic style should you use?

The style required by your organisation; failing that, an explicit convention supplied for the exercise.

Can you use internal documents?

The exercises use fictitious or anonymised cases, exclusively within tools authorised by the organisation.

Last updated: