citation-standards

A set of rules for presenting web-search findings with inline links and a final sources list.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reporting web research, especially when including facts, names, numbers, or dates.
Why use it?
It makes research answers traceable by requiring claims to be linked to sources returned by the search.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/parallel-web/parallel-cursor-plugin/citation-standards
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/parallel-web/parallel-cursor-plugin
Per session 13 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 204 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00013 $0.00204
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00102
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00041
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00020

Measured yesterday against content hash 99779f85d63a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

citation-standards scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

rules/citation-standards.mdc · 34 lines

What it actually says

Citation Standards

When presenting information from web search results:

Inline Citations

  • Every claim must have an inline citation using markdown links: Source Title
  • Only cite URLs that appear in the search output — never invent or guess URLs
  • Do not leave any factual claim uncited

Response Structure

  • Lead with the key answer or finding
  • Include specific facts, names, numbers, and dates
  • Cite every fact inline as Source Title
  • Organize by theme if covering multiple topics

Sources Section

End every search response with a Sources section listing all referenced URLs:

Sources:
- [Source Title](https://example.com/article) (Feb 2026)
- [Another Source](https://example.com/other) (Jan 2026)

This Sources section is mandatory. Do not omit it.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 34 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A 99779f85d63a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

citation-standards is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository parallel-web/parallel-cursor-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 204 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.