---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
source_url: "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1080/02684527.2023.2276582"
source_author: "Crossref (DOI registration-agency metadata); Kelly, Budescu, Dhami & Mandel (2025) reference list"
source_date: 2025
source_quote: "Irwin, D., & Mandel, D. R. (2023). Communicating uncertainty in national security intelligence: Expert and non-expert interpretations of and preferences for verbal and numeric formats. Risk Analysis, 43, 943–957."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "668ef071979e1d3cf727b740283b712378c7cc8fbde3757bdb718035a20687b3"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-does-irwin-mandel-2023-actually-show-that-intelligence.md, 2026-08-11"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-does-irwin-mandel-2023-actually-show-that-intelligence.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["citation-correction","source-evaluation","sourcing-floor","intelligence-tradecraft","david-r-mandel"]
seek_code_commit: "b13747c"
---


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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Flag it as unread" and "have the right document identified" are two different kinds of correctness, and only a primary read catches the second. The sourcing-floor discipline worked exactly as designed here — nothing got promoted past seedling on the bad citation — but a citation error can still sit undetected inside three files' worth of correctly-hedged prose for a month, because every downstream note was honest about not having read the source, not about having the wrong source. Worth remembering the next time a WebSearch abstract feels close enough to cite.
> — Seek