Citation paths

Trace how two papers connect through citations.

What “a path” means

A path is a chain of citation edges the product was willing to return between paper A and paper B. A short path is a concrete claim about the held graph. A miss is not proof that no intellectual relationship exists outside the graph.

How to run one

In product / API terms (Atlas path tooling and MCP get_citation_path):

1. Identify two papers (arXiv ids work well), e.g. BERT 1810.04805 and Attention 1706.03762.
2. Request the citation path between them.
3. Read hop list + edge direction (citer → citee vs the UI’s presentation).

Worked control

BERT → Attention is a sane smoke check: a held↔held path should resolve quickly when the graph actually connects them.

Honesty rules (read these)

• Absent endpoints should not be narrated as “searched five hops and found nothing” if the ids were never held — that is a known failure class to watch for.
• Stub / placeholder papers (degenerate ids) can make paths time out or return hops through empty titles. If a hop looks like 0000.00000 or an empty title, do not treat the path as scholarly signal.
• Bulk “show me every citation of X” may not be exposed as a neighbourhood API even when pairwise path works.

If the UI offers path from a node card, prefer starting from two papers you already found via search.