v2026.08.14 — Citations You Can Follow

A citation the reader cannot follow is decoration, not provenance. Three defects stood between the archive’s sources and the people consuming them.

Fixed

Saint citations were always empty. The reader queried tabula_scopus='sancti' while both writers stored devotio.sancti — the strings never matched, so every citation in the archive fell through the gap in silence.
Documented saint lookup routes were inverted and returned 422/404 when followed. The correct forms are GET /v1/devotio/saints/slug/{slug}, GET /v1/devotio/saints/{saint_id}, and GET /v1/devotio/saints/slug/{slug}/feast.
The Summa article example in the docs showed Latin field names (quaestio_id, numerus, titulus). Responses use English (question_id, number, title).

citations[].bibliography — volume, author, article and rights for cited print works. Previously written to the database and never served.
citations[].source — resolves an internal citation to opus_slug and chapter_slug, so a saint’s life links to the very chapter it was drawn from: GET /v1/veritas/opera/{opus_slug}/read/{chapter_slug}.
scripture_citations[].book_slug and .book_name on Summa articles. Proof-texts previously carried only an internal book_id that consumers had no means of resolving.
Full schema tables for CitationRead, CitationSourceRef and SummaScriptureCitation in the engine documentation.

Documentation now states plainly that provenance is recorded only for hand-scribed saints. An empty citations array is not a claim that no source exists — the backfill is deliberately human-reviewed, since name similarity alone cannot establish that an article is the life of a given saint.