Citation policy (P1)

Every detector ships with at least one peer-reviewed citation. The constraint — known internally as P1 — is the most stringent guarantee cntrdct makes, and it is enforced structurally rather than by convention.

The rule

Every Layer 1 detector must declare at least one citation. The citation must point at a peer-reviewed publication or established benchmark that justifies the detection.
Multi-language detectors should ship at least one citation grounded in empirical work on each supported language. This is a SHOULD, not a MUST — see Multi-language below for the boundary cases.
Citations have DOIs where possible. The Q-6 retraction monitor uses the DOI to cross-check against Retraction Watch and Crossref Works.

Enforcement points

Point	Check
`core::register_detector`	Rejects any `Detector` whose `citations()` returns empty at startup.
`tests/citations_consistency.rs`	Every citation key declared by any detector resolves to an entry in `CITATIONS.md`.
`tests/citations_consistency.rs`	Each `supported_languages()` is either matched by a per-language citation or carries an explicit `unconfirmed:` annotation pointing at the survey notes.
`.github/workflows/citations.yml`	Q-6 retraction monitor (see below).

A detector with empty citations() cannot register, so a P1 violation fails before scan even begins. The consistency test runs on every push and PR.

Multi-language extension

P1 was authored when cntrdct was Rust-only. The M-6 spec (docs/spec/citations-policy.md) codifies the multi-language case. When a detector declares support for a new language, the implementer runs a literature survey and records its outcome as one of:

Confirmed — a peer-reviewed citation grounded in empirical work on the target language exists, either because the cited paper’s experimental subjects include that language, because a separate peer-reviewed paper applies the algorithm to that language with quantitative evaluation, or because the citation introduces a benchmark in that language.
Unconfirmed — the survey returned no qualifying citation. The detector still ships; the gap is captured in Evidence.language_citation_status and exposed at SARIF emission time as properties.languageCitationStatus. SARIF consumers can filter or weight indirectly-grounded findings.

When the survey is Unconfirmed, the implementer must still record the search under docs/surveys/<detector>-<lang>-<YYYY-MM>.md — the deliverable is the survey itself, not the citation. The existing Rust citations on the v0 detectors are grandfathered, since they predate the multi-language rule.

The current per-language statuses (excerpted from docs/spec/citations-policy.md):

Detector	Language	Status
`unreachable-after-terminator`	Rust	Grandfathered
`unreachable-after-terminator`	Python	Unconfirmed
`comment-code`	Rust	Grandfathered
`comment-code`	Python	Unconfirmed
`arg-swap`	Rust	Grandfathered
`arg-swap`	Python	Confirmed (Allamanis et al. NeurIPS 2021, PyBugLab)
`clone-drift`	Rust	Grandfathered
`clone-drift`	Python	Confirmed (Assi et al. TOSEM 2025)
`pr-miner`	Rust	Grandfathered
`pr-miner`	Python	Unconfirmed

CITATIONS.md layout

CITATIONS.md is grouped by layer:

Layer 1 — per-detector citations.
Layer 2 — ranker statistical methods (Wilson interval, Brown-Cai-DasGupta 2001, Thulin 2014).
Layer 3 — LLM adjudicator references (Platt 1999, Spiess et al. 2025, the cross-model κ references).

Each entry carries the venue, year, DOI when available, and a Languages: line declaring which languages the citation is grounded in (M-6 extension).

Q-6 retraction monitor

P1’s “peer-reviewed prior art” assumption breaks if a cited paper is retracted after shipping. The Q-6 monitor (scripts/check_retractions.py) closes this loop on every CI run:

DOIs are extracted from CITATIONS.md and from every Citation { doi: Some("...") } slot under src/.
Each DOI is checked against (a) a cached Retraction Watch snapshot at benchmarks/retraction-watch/cache.csv, pinned by cache.sha256, and (b) Crossref Works’ update-to field with type: "retraction".
A Mondays-06:00-UTC cron refreshes the cache via the Crossref Labs endpoint and opens a chore(citations): refresh Retraction Watch cache PR when the snapshot changes.
A synthetic-DOI fixture at tests/fixtures/retraction-watch/ pins the failure path so a future loosening of the matcher breaks CI rather than silently re-opening citations to retracted work.