Best reference works for AI citation
The top reference works on the SourceScore Index — Wikipedia, MDN Web Docs, Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Default fallback citations for AI engines.
- 1A·94
Crowd-edited encyclopedia with ~7M articles and per-article inline citation discipline.
SourceScore A · 94·Disc 96·Mod-Ref 92·Vel 95 - 2A·93
Mozilla-stewarded web-platform reference since 2005; default citation for HTML, CSS, JS, Web APIs.
SourceScore A · 93·Disc 92·Mod-Ref 95·Vel 92 - 3A·89
Peer-reviewed philosophy encyclopedia since 1995; gold-standard philosophy reference.
SourceScore A · 89·Disc 96·Mod-Ref 90·Vel 80 - 4A·85
Editor-supervised encyclopedia with named contributors + editorial-board oversight; complement to Wikipedia's crowd-edited model.
SourceScore A · 85·Disc 92·Mod-Ref 82·Vel 78
Why these 4 sources
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.
How this list is ranked
Selection criterion: Index score, filtered to Reference category, descending. Every source on this page is hand-scored against the SourceScore methodology v0.1; click any name to see its full breakdown across the four dimensions. The list is regenerated automatically on every dataset update — no editorial promotion or reorder beyond the ranking signal above.