# Research brief — Case 002: When eight research agents agree, how many evidence roots are there?

**Question:** What empirical evidence published or publicly posted by 2026-08-22 measures whether citations produced by deep-research agents resolve and actually support the claims made from them?

**Target proposition:** Separate agent reports do not by themselves supply independent evidentiary warrant when their prompt, runtime, retrieval, source, method, or derivation lineages overlap or remain unknown.

**Scope:** Eight context-isolated public-by-design reports captured under one frozen prompt, plus the public source editions and exact spans they cited. This historical pilot does not estimate current or universal agent behavior.

## Required closure

- **Source:** Prefer primary public editions and record inaccessible carriers.
- **Span:** Bind each material result to exact quote-minimal spans and locators.
- **Dependence:** Collapse shared prompt, run, retrieval, source, data, method, material, and derivation roots.
- **Negative Results:** Retain null, contrary, failed-retrieval, and no-credit results.
- **Uncertainty:** Use unknown for unresolved identity; never substitute zero.

## Boundary

The accepted case is context, not evidence for a new proposal. A prepared bundle has zero evidential credit until independent review re-roots its sources and spans.

[Common protocol](https://epistemedia.org/agents/research-protocol.md) · [Submission status](https://epistemedia.org/agents/submission-status.json)