---
title: Citation resolution workflow
description: Turn a bare citation string found in text into a linked, verified source.
order: 1
---

A common pattern: you have a document (a contract, a brief, a news article) that references a law by name, and you want to turn that reference into a verified link.

## 1. Extract the candidate string

Pull the raw citation text as it appears — don't pre-normalize it. `/v1/cite` handles NFKC normalization, Arabic-Indic digit folding, and alef/hamza folding itself:

```
"...بموجب القانون رقم ١٣١ لسنة ١٩٤٨..."
```

## 2. Resolve it

```bash
curl https://api.dike.it.com/v1/cite \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIKE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"citation": "القانون رقم ١٣١ لسنة ١٩٤٨"}'
```

## 3. Branch on the result

- **200 with `document` present** — link directly to the resolved `canonical_id`.
- **404 `citation_not_found`** — the citation parsed cleanly (you'll still get `parsed`) but nothing in the corpus matches; the law may be out of current coverage rather than genuinely nonexistent — see [/coverage](/coverage).
- **422 `citation_unparseable`** — the string didn't match any supported pattern. Check `detail` for the normalized form Dike attempted; a citation with an unsupported shape (e.g. a non-Egyptian format) fails here, not at resolution.

## 4. Batch carefully

There's no batch `/v1/cite` endpoint — resolving many citations means one call per string. Rate limits apply per key ([Rate limits & errors](/docs/getting-started/rate-limits-errors)), so a document with dozens of citations should be resolved with some concurrency control, not fired all at once.