Citations

Every answer that uses your books names the book and the pages. You can open those pages yourself and confirm the claim.

Inline citations#

Readers cite inside the sentence, as in (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, pp. 10-12). The pages are the ones the reader opened. To check one, open those pages in the book, or ask your agent: "Show me pages 10-12 of Designing Data-Intensive Applications."

The citation block#

After the answer, a boxed summary lists what happened. It has four fields: Read, Learned, How it helped, and Worth remembering.

Trove
Read: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, pp. 10-12
Learned: Replication lag can make a reader see old data.
How it helped: Chose read-your-writes for the profile page.
Worth remembering: Test failover with a lagging replica.

Turn the block off#

Open Settings → Answers → Citation block and choose Show or Hide. Hide removes only the box. Inline citations stay, so you can still check every claim.

Preview pages on Personal#

Some books are Professional-only. When you are on the Personal plan, a reader sees a preview of the first pages and says so, for example "preview of N of M pages". Upgrade at billing to read the rest. See Plans and limits.

When books disagree#

If two books conflict or one is out of date, a good answer shows both with citations, recommends one and asks you to choose. See Get answers you can trust.

Common mistakes#

• No citation block appears: check Settings → Answers → Citation block. If it says Hide, choose Show.
• A cited page looks wrong: ask your agent to show the table of contents of the book, and confirm that you have the right edition.

Direct CLI#

Your agent runs these through the trove command. You can run them yourself in a terminal, but asking your agent is the recommended way: it picks the right flags, waits for processing and checks the result.

• Read the cited pages: trove items read "<id>:10-12"
• Show the table of contents: trove items toc <id>

See the CLI reference.

Related#

• Get answers you can trust covers conflicting books and topics no book covers.
• Research a topic shows how to read a cited answer.
• Item reader is the subagent that writes citations.
• Library and books explains reading by page range.