CITAE: A Passage-Verifiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Platform for Researchers and Thesis Writers
Assistants based on large language models accelerate scholarly reading, but they hallucinate, which is unacceptable in academic work where every claim must be traceable to a source. We present CITAE, an open-source web application that integrates the complete scientific-literature workflow—discovery, read- ing, verification, organisation and citation—into a single system, and makes AI grounding visible to the user rather than hidden inside the model. Built as a React frontend over a layered Node.js/Express backend and a PostgreSQL database, its reading assistant ranks the user’s papers and highlights with Okapi BM25 (k1 = 1.5, b = 0.75) and injects the top-ranked, numbered passages into the prompt; the answer’s inline [n] markers are then bound back to the passages they cite and rendered as trust cards that expose the lit- eral supporting text and its source. A second, single-document assistant additionally verifies every quoted passage against the source and discards any that cannot be matched, so fabricated evidence never reaches the reader. A provider-agnostic client routes every model call through each user’s own keys, failing over across Groq, Google Gemini and OpenRouter, so the AI features run at no cost under a bring-your-own-key scheme and degrade gracefully. Around this core, CITAE unifies multi-source discovery over Crossref, Se- mantic Scholar, OpenAlex and arXiv with claim verification, paper comparison, literature reports, spaced review and citation in seven styles. We report an engineering evaluation on the production code: in-memory BM25 retrieval takes 0.5 ms over 100 and 6.4 ms over 1,000 passages; the deterministic verification guard attains precision, recall and F1 of 1.000 on a labelled 50-quotation probe set, rejecting all adversarial “genuine-prefix + fabricated-tail” strings; and an 86-case test suite covers the deterministic core. Offered bilingually with a Spanish-first default, free and open source, CITAE is an equity-oriented alternative to today’s fragmented, mostly proprietary and English-first landscape.