AANA Research Grounding Skill

Ensures research answers and reports strictly cite and align with allowed sources, clearly marking unsupported or uncertain claims before publishing.

Use this skill when an OpenClaw-style agent drafts a research answer, literature note, report section, cited summary, evidence brief, or knowledge-base answer that must stay inside known sources.

This is an instruction-only skill. It does not install packages, run commands, write files, call remote services, persist memory, or execute a checker on its own.

Core Principle

Every important claim must stay attached to the evidence that supports it.

The agent should separate:

• what the sources support,
• what the sources do not support,
• what is uncertain,
• what would require more retrieval or human review.

When To Use

Use this skill before producing or publishing:

• cited answers,
• research summaries,
• literature-review notes,
• technical explainers,
• policy or legal-adjacent briefs,
• scientific or medical-adjacent summaries,
• internal knowledge-base answers,
• meeting or document syntheses,
• public claims based on limited source material.

Grounding Loop

1. Source list: identify the sources the answer is allowed to use.
2. Claim list: list the answer's main factual claims.
3. Citation check: verify each claim is supported by an allowed source.
4. Boundary check: remove or label any claim based on missing, forbidden, stale, private, or uncertain evidence.
5. Uncertainty check: state source limits before confident conclusions when evidence is incomplete.
6. Correction: revise, retrieve, ask, defer, or refuse when claims cannot be grounded.
7. Final gate: only provide the answer once unsupported claims, invented citations, and missing caveats are resolved.

AANA Constraint Map

• Physical / factual: no invented citations, no fake studies, no unsupported numbers, no impossible facts.
• Human impact: do not create false confidence, especially in health, legal, financial, safety, or public-facing contexts.
• Constructed / task: use only the requested source set, citation style, scope, and output format.
• Feedback integrity: distinguish sourced claims, inference, speculation, and missing evidence.

Citation Rules

• Cite only sources that are actually available in the task context.
• Do not invent titles, authors, URLs, dates, page numbers, quotes, statistics, or benchmark results.
• Do not cite a source for a claim it does not support.
• If source coverage is incomplete, say so.
• If a claim needs retrieval, recommend retrieval instead of guessing.
• If the user asks for a source-bounded answer, do not use outside knowledge unless explicitly allowed.

Source Boundary Rules

Treat these as violations:

• using a forbidden source,
• using private or unrelated user data,
• treating search snippets as full evidence without noting the limit,
• treating one source as broad consensus,
• upgrading a hypothesis into a result,
• presenting outdated information as current,
• preserving a citation while changing the claim beyond what the source supports.

Uncertainty Language

Use clear uncertainty labels:

• "The provided sources support..."
• "The provided sources do not establish..."
• "I cannot verify from the provided evidence..."
• "This is an inference, not a directly sourced claim..."
• "More retrieval is needed before claiming..."

Avoid false certainty:

• "proves"
• "guarantees"
• "all experts agree"
• "studies show" without naming the source
• exact percentages not present in the evidence

Review Payload

When using a configured AANA checker, send only a minimal redacted review payload:

• task_summary
• allowed_sources
• claim_summaries
• citation_summaries
• unsupported_or_uncertain_claims
• recommended_action

Do not include private records, secrets, paywalled full text, API keys, unrelated user messages, or raw source material when a summary is enough.

Decision Rule

• If every important claim is supported by allowed sources, answer with citations.
• If a claim is unsupported but fixable, revise.
• If evidence is missing, retrieve or ask.
• If the user requires a source-bounded answer and the evidence is insufficient, say what cannot be concluded.
• If the answer would create high-impact false confidence, defer or ask for human review.
• If a checker is unavailable or untrusted, use manual review.

Output Pattern

For source-grounded answers, prefer:

Answer:
- ...

Evidence:
- [Source A] supports ...
- [Source B] supports ...

Limits:
- The provided sources do not show ...
- Uncertainty remains about ...

Keep the answer useful, but never make unsupported confidence look like evidence.