Chain-of-Evidence: A framework for verifiable research
The CoE is a conceptual framework that defines what makes a research artifact trustworthy, much as ACID defines what makes a database transaction reliable. Rather than prescribing how to build a research agent, the framework specifies the properties its outputs must have. It follows a single principle with two halves: every claim in a research artifact must carry a recorded evidence chain (completeness), and each chain must genuinely support the claim it is attached to (correctness). A claim may be a reference, a reported number, a method description, or a conclusion, that must link back to corresponding evidence, such as a peer-reviewed paper, an experimental log line, the code that actually ran, or the results table.
A hallucinated reference points to a paper that does not exist. An unreproducible score does not reappear when the code is re-run. A misdescribed method claims one algorithm in the paper while the code implements another. Each is a claim whose chain back to its evidence is broken; the CoE Audit makes these breaks measurable.