The premise of an anthology of current practice is that every entry has a reason, and the reason is somebody’s published work. That premise survives exactly as long as the link from claim to evidence is mandatory. Make it optional and it decays quietly: nothing breaks, the list still renders, and over time it becomes a list of assertions with a provenance field that is usually blank.
The mechanism is not “remember to cite”. It is that a document which does not
name its source fails the build. In this record that is
requires = ["source"] on the SOTA scheme, and it is a small enough thing
that it is worth being precise about why it works: the check fires at the
moment of writing, while the person filing the practice still knows where
they read it. A citation reconstructed six months later costs a session; one
written at filing time costs a line.
Applied here: SOTA requires source:, and LIT requires a source of
its own — an arxiv: or doi: a remote can resolve, or failing both a
url:; at least one, enforced (ADR-009). While the
requirement was arxiv: alone it immediately found two papers in the
corpus that had reached it with no identifier at all; it was widened when
the first report worth filing had never been posted there. The arXiv and
DOI remotes turn those ids into resolvable references rather than strings,
so “cite the paper” and “the citation resolves” are the same check rather
than two — which is also why a bare url: is the last resort and not the
general case.
The corollary is the expensive part. Requiring the field is easy; keeping it meaningful means the evidence has to be a document in the record, not a URL — because a URL cannot be found to be retired, cannot be counted, and cannot tell you that eleven practices depend on a paper you just decided was wrong.