DS@GT ARC at LongEval: Citation Integrity and Factual Grounding in Scientific QA

This paper describes DS@GT ARC's submission to the CLEF 2026 LongEval Task 4 on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In this submission, we examine a divergence between traditional natural language evaluation metrics and citation integrity as applied to RAG QA systems. We evaluate a corrective pipeline using Corrective RAG (CRAG) and CiteFix against baseline and frontier model benchmark RAG QA scores. While frontier models maximized answer relevance and fluency scores, our RAGAs LLM-as-judge diagnostics indicate that frontier models would correctly identify relevant documents without using their context in answer generation. Conversely, by filtering chunks pre-generation and enforcing strict entailment of generated claims to the cited material post-generation, our corrective pipeline marginally improved citation faithfulness and answer grounding. We propose that evaluation of trustworthy RAG QA requires metrics that reward strict answer grounding.