# ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09156 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09156/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 16 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01608/) (2019)
- [Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.4578/) (2014)
- [Local Citation Recommendation with Hierarchical-Attention Text Encoder and SciBERT-based Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01206/) (2021)
- [HalluCitation Matters: Revealing the Impact of Hallucinated References with 300 Hallucinated Papers in ACL Conferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18724/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models Reflect Human Citation Patterns with a Heightened Citation Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15739/) (2024)
- [ALiiCE: Evaluating Positional Fine-grained Citation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13375/) (2024)
- [ScholarCopilot: Training Large Language Models for Academic Writing with Accurate Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00824/) (2025)
- [CiteBART: Learning to Generate Citations for Local Citation Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17534/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate citations are the foundation of academic writing, tracing intellectual origins and substantiating core claims. However, manually navigating the growing volume of scientific literature is increasingly difficult, prompting reliance on automatic citation recommendation. While modern retrieval-augmented architectures have largely mitigated the fabrication of non-existent papers, current systems relying on semantic similarity struggle with misattribution, often citing authentic papers that fail to logically support the author's claim. To address this challenge, we argue that accurate citation requires a shift from similarity-based search to active, claim-level reasoning. We propose ReCite, a decoupled agentic framework that orchestrates location perception, intent-aware query planning, and reflective verification. Trained on synthesized reasoning trajectories, our agent verifies claim-evidence consistency and triggers self-correction loops when retrieved candidates lack logical support. Experiments demonstrate that our lightweight framework outperforms state-of-the-art massive generative models in strict citation accuracy. By grounding literature matching in verifiable logic rather than semantic overlap, ReCite establishes a reliable foundation for automated academic writing.