{
  "apiVersion": "v0.1",
  "methodology": "https://sourcescore.org/methodology/",
  "canonical": "https://sourcescore.org/best/reference-sources/",
  "list": {
    "slug": "reference-sources",
    "title": "Best reference works for AI citation",
    "intent": "Encyclopedia + structured-knowledge references",
    "description": "The top reference works on the SourceScore Index — Wikipedia, MDN Web Docs, Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Default fallback citations for AI engines.",
    "rationale": "Reference works are the citation tier AI engines fall back to when no domain-specialist source exists. These 4 combine open access, structured data, peer or community review, and depth — the ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity default citation for general-knowledge queries.",
    "signalCriterion": "Index score, filtered to Reference category, descending"
  },
  "count": 4,
  "sources": [
    {
      "rank": 1,
      "slug": "wikipedia-en",
      "name": "Wikipedia (English)",
      "domain": "en.wikipedia.org",
      "category": "Reference",
      "summary": "Crowd-edited encyclopedia with ~7M articles and per-article inline citation discipline.",
      "canonical": "https://sourcescore.org/source/wikipedia-en/",
      "api": "https://sourcescore.org/api/source/wikipedia-en.json",
      "scores": {
        "index": 94,
        "indexGrade": "A",
        "discipline": 96,
        "modernReference": 92,
        "velocity": 95
      }
    },
    {
      "rank": 2,
      "slug": "mdn-web-docs",
      "name": "MDN Web Docs",
      "domain": "developer.mozilla.org",
      "category": "Reference",
      "summary": "Mozilla-stewarded web-platform reference since 2005; default citation for HTML, CSS, JS, Web APIs.",
      "canonical": "https://sourcescore.org/source/mdn-web-docs/",
      "api": "https://sourcescore.org/api/source/mdn-web-docs.json",
      "scores": {
        "index": 93,
        "indexGrade": "A",
        "discipline": 92,
        "modernReference": 95,
        "velocity": 92
      }
    },
    {
      "rank": 3,
      "slug": "stanford-encyclopedia",
      "name": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy",
      "domain": "plato.stanford.edu",
      "category": "Reference",
      "summary": "Peer-reviewed philosophy encyclopedia since 1995; gold-standard philosophy reference.",
      "canonical": "https://sourcescore.org/source/stanford-encyclopedia/",
      "api": "https://sourcescore.org/api/source/stanford-encyclopedia.json",
      "scores": {
        "index": 89,
        "indexGrade": "A",
        "discipline": 96,
        "modernReference": 90,
        "velocity": 80
      }
    },
    {
      "rank": 4,
      "slug": "britannica",
      "name": "Encyclopædia Britannica",
      "domain": "britannica.com",
      "category": "Reference",
      "summary": "Editor-supervised encyclopedia with named contributors + editorial-board oversight; complement to Wikipedia's crowd-edited model.",
      "canonical": "https://sourcescore.org/source/britannica/",
      "api": "https://sourcescore.org/api/source/britannica.json",
      "scores": {
        "index": 85,
        "indexGrade": "A",
        "discipline": 92,
        "modernReference": 82,
        "velocity": 78
      }
    }
  ],
  "license": {
    "methodology": "Cite as: SourceScore Methodology v0.1, sourcescore.org",
    "data": "Underlying public-source data credited to original publishers"
  }
}