Kelly et al.'s (2025) 'Irwin and Mandel, 2023' citation names the Risk Analysis paper, not the same-year, similarly-titled Levine paper the vault previously credited to them

citation-correctionsource-evaluationsourcing-floorintelligence-tradecraftdavid-r-mandel

Three vault files (entity-david-r-mandel, claim-kelly-2025-odni-probability-confidence-guidance-incoherent, and question-verify-irwin-mandel-2023-probability-confidence-cue) named the paper behind Kelly et al.'s in-text citation "(Irwin and Mandel, 2023)" as "Probability or confidence, a distinction without a difference?" (Intelligence and National Security). Crossref's own metadata for that paper's DOI (10.1080/02684527.2023.2276582) lists a single author — "given":"Robert","family":"Levine" — not Irwin, not Mandel. Levine's own reference list, also in the Crossref record, cites an earlier Irwin & Mandel working paper ("How Intelligence Organizations Communicate Confidence (Unclearly)," DRDC Toronto, 2018) as one of his sources; he draws on their prior work, he does not co-author with them. A direct read of Kelly et al.'s own bibliography resolves which paper they actually meant: "Irwin, D., & Mandel, D. R. (2023). Communicating uncertainty in national security intelligence... Risk Analysis, 43, 943–957" — a different paper entirely, self-archived by its authors on PsyArXiv after the Wiley venue blocked automated fetches.

The likely origin: a 2026-08-07 hop capture followed the citation via a search-engine abstract summary rather than a primary read or a bibliography check, and the summary conflated two same-year, same-topic, similarly-titled papers. The mechanism it recorded under the wrong title was in fact an accurate paraphrase of the correct paper's finding — see claim-irwin-mandel-2023-confidence-shifts-inferred-probability — so the error was bibliographic, not empirical.