# F4-conf-04 — Verification of a five-item reference list

# Question

For each of five cited arXiv studies, does (i) the title in the reference entry match the document, (ii) the year agree with the first-submission year or the year of the version in the extract, and (iii) is the finding the manuscript attributes to it ("cited_for") stated in the extract or does it follow arithmetically from it? A reference that fails any of these checks is unverifiable.

# Data and exclusions

• data/reference_list.json (5 references) and the five extracts in data/sources/ (134, 58, 107, 66 and 91 lines), plus data/README.md (17 lines) for provenance. The only evidence used is the extracts (header and body). I did not use anything I remember about the papers or any other version of them.
• Nothing was excluded. All 5 references were assessed (15 checks in total).

# Method

out/analysis.py does everything with the standard library:

• Title: the entry title, the header Title: line and the body # title line are compared after normalisation (case, punctuation, diacritics, "&"→"and").
• Year: the entry year is compared with the first-submission year and with the year of the reproduced version, both taken from the "Bibliographic record" line.
• Finding: for each reference the script pulls out the table cells and text lines that decide the check and prints them. It then compares every element of cited_for (magnitude, SE/CI, significance, timing, population or design) with what is printed. Where a value follows arithmetically, the script recomputes it: |t| = ATT/SE; exp(ATT)−1; β/mean; affected employment / affected wage.

# Results

Unverifiable references: R3. It fails all three checks:

• Title: the entry's title ("Restaurants, Cafés and Neighbourhood Change: Commercial Entry and House Prices in Greater London") is a different title from the document's ("Does Entry of Food-and-Drink Establishments Raise Local House Prices? Event-Study Evidence from London").
• Year: the entry gives 2024, but v1 was submitted in March 2026 and v2 in April 2026.
• Finding: the source reports a gradual rise, from about 0.5% in the event year to 3.4–3.7% after four to five years, and says explicitly that "prices do not jump immediately". That contradicts the cited "jump of 3.4–3.7% in the year of entry with no further appreciation".

n_verified = 4.

Notes on the four verified references:

• R1: the abstract and Section 6 confirm a staggered difference-in-differences design on Swiss individual-level hospital records.
• R4: the extract itself calls −0.732 the "own-wage employment elasticity". It also equals −0.268/0.366, which the script recomputed.
• R5: −0.0962/0.261 = −0.3686, against −0.3685 printed. The gap is consistent with the mean being rounded. The abstract's headline (0.0855, 18.79%) is a different estimate from Table 2, which is not in the extract. The citation correctly uses Table 3 col (4), which the text calls the "most preferred specification".

# Uncertainty

No sampling or statistical uncertainty is involved; these are deterministic comparisons of text. The judgement-dependent points are:

1. R1 standard error. The same CS-DR 5 km estimate is printed with SE (0.210) in Table 6 but (0.218) in Table A19. The citation quotes the main table (Table 6), so I count it as supported. Significance at 5% holds under either SE: |t| = 2.05 or 1.98, and both tables print **.
2. R5 rounding. The 0.0001 gap between −0.0962/0.261 and the printed −0.3685 is treated as rounding. The citation quotes the printed 36.85%.
3. R3 is not borderline. Each of its three failures would make it unverifiable on its own.

# Limitations and open issues

• The checks are only as good as the extracts. Content outside the extracts (for example Table 2 in Tossou, or the omitted sections of each paper) could not be consulted, as the task requires.

• Internal inconsistencies in the sources are recorded in data_issues but not resolved. In Armendariz:

  • the SE for the same estimate differs between Table 6 (0.210) and Table A19 (0.218);
  • the Table A19 note says 640 control regions, while the table rows say 608;
  • the abstract says fatal hospitalisations fall by 35%, but Table 7 gives −0.354 (≈ −29.8%) and Section 6.1 says ≈30%;
  • the paragraph discussing Table A19 is cut off.

  None of these affects the R1 finding as cited.

• Rendering defects were handled as documented in data_issues: re-set tables in Li et al., the garbled Table 3 header in Liu & Zhao, inline footnotes in Tossou, and SEs on separate lines.

• The title comparison is automated with normalisation. A title differing only typographically would pass; the only mismatch found (R3) is a different title, not a typographic variant.