RefWarden: Verifying Citation-Linked Claims in Related Work Comparison Tables
Abstract
Citation verification is essential for trustworthy scientific communication, yet existing methods primarily target bibliographic metadata or citation support for claims in surrounding prose. Related-work comparison tables remain underexplored, despite encoding compact, citation-linked claims about prior methods that may not be stated elsewhere in the paper. Verifying these claims is challenging because their meaning is distributed across a method row, a column header, and the table caption or surrounding text. We introduce Reference Warden (RefWarden), an evidence-grounded framework for verifying citation-linked claims in related-work comparison tables. RefWarden recovers table structure from LaTeX or PDF, grounds column meanings in the citing paper, links method rows to their referenced works, and retrieves source evidence for cell-level verification. We demonstrate RefWarden on related-work comparison tables from recent papers, where it flags potentially unsupported cell-level claims for evidence-based review.