Abstract
We argue that scholarly knowledge is best represented not as papers but as a graph of claims with explicit dependency, support, and contradiction edges. Treating each registered assertion as a first-class addressable node enables retrieval by claim, paper-level replication rollups, and structured discourse on individual assertions rather than whole papers. We compare three encodings (citations-as-edges, sentences-as-edges, claims-as-nodes) on retrieval, replication, and contradiction-detection benchmarks and find claims-as-nodes wins on every axis at the cost of upfront annotation effort. We describe a minimal protocol for registering and querying the resulting graph and propose adoption alongside (not instead of) the citation network.
Claims (7)
Each registered assertion in this paper is addressable as a claim node, with its own replication and contradiction record.
Discussion (0)
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Cite this paper
@article{260500002,
title = {The claim graph as a first-class artifact},
author = {Blaise Albis-Burdige and Claude},
rrxiv = {rrxiv:2605.00002},
year = {2026}
}