A scroll-to-source citation is a citation that is also a live pointer — clicking it scrolls the original document to the exact passage the claim came from and highlights it, so you can read the source in context without leaving the page.
A plain citation tells you that a claim is supported. A scroll-to-source citation shows you where — and gets you there in one click.
Why it matters
The whole point of a citation is verification, but most citations make verification expensive. A page number, a footnote, or a quoted snippet still leaves you to find the passage yourself, scrolling a long PDF or hunting through a wiki page. Many people simply don't bother, which means a confident-looking citation can mask an AI hallucination that no one ever checks.
Scroll-to-source citations collapse that cost to nothing. Because the citation knows the precise location of its supporting text, clicking it jumps you straight there and highlights it. Verification stops being a chore and becomes a reflex — you click, you see the sentence, you trust the answer.
How it works
For this to work, each claim must be tied to a specific span in the source rather than to the document as a whole:
- Source-grounding constrains every claim to a retrieved passage, so there is an exact span to point at.
- That span is stored with a location — a character range, an anchor, or coordinates on a PDF page.
- The citation links to that location, and the reader scrolls and highlights it on click.
This is a Sidenote signature feature. Because Sidenote reads documents where they live, its citations point back into the real Confluence page, Notion doc, or PDF you started from — click any citation and it scrolls to and highlights the exact source passage. No upload, no copy-paste, no guessing. The answer always comes with the sentence it stands on.