Citation provenance

Prime rule: a paper you did not retrieve and read does not exist. Every citation key in this pipeline traces to a bibliography.jsonl entry with provenance and a literature/<key>.md note. No exceptions.

Retrieval ladder (degrade gracefully)

1. WebSearch — scholarly queries ("<topic> site:arxiv.org", venue names, author names from seeds). Provenance: websearch.
2. WebFetch — fetch abstract/HTML pages for candidates found in (1). Provenance: webfetch. If a fetch fails (403/timeout), keep the search snippet as read_status: abstract-only ONLY if the snippet contained the actual abstract; otherwise drop the paper.
3. Seeds — files in workspace/seeds/. Provenance: seed.
4. User-provided notes — material the user pasted or described. Provenance: user-provided.

In --offline mode, skip 1–2 entirely.

Investigation rounds

• Round 1 — graph expansion: from the task topic + seeds, gather candidate papers (titles, venues, years, why-relevant). Record the growing graph in investigation/citation-graph.json: {nodes: [{key?, title, year, source}], edges: [[from, to, "cites|extends|compares"]]}.
• Round 2 — elite pool: score candidates on relevance to the task (core / adjacent / background) and quality signals; keep 10–50 in investigation/elite-pool.json. Relevance gate: fewer than 5 core+adjacent sources ⇒ append {"event":"stage_investigate","detail":"ABORTED: relevance gate"} to the ledger, reply ok: false, and stop — do not force a weak brief.
• Round 3 — deep read: for each elite paper, write literature/<key>.md (provenance frontmatter, factual summary, findings relevant to the task) and append its entry to bibliography.jsonl. Run python3 .claude/scripts/bib_validate.py <run> and fix any errors.
• Write investigation/round{1,2,3}.md documenting decisions per round.

The brief

brief.md sections: Problem · State of the Art · Gap · Constraints (from task.md) · Candidate Directions · Related Work. Every prior-work statement carries [EV:cite:<key>]. The brief is the Ideator's ONLY literature input — make the Gap and Candidate Directions concrete enough to generate from.