Traceability

Rule 3 of the archive: every important thesis claim is traceable.

The chain

Not every claim needs every link. A claim about the literature stops at the citation; a claim about what was built stops at the code artifact. What is not allowed is a claim about what was found that does not reach an experiment.

Auditing

The audit is a table per chapter on thesis progress: claims made, claims traced, claims untraced. A chapter reaches draft when its prose is complete; it reaches review only when its untraced count is zero.

How a claim gets traced

1. Write the claim.
2. Name the identifier that supports it, inline, as a link.
3. If no identifier exists, either the evidence has not been recorded yet, or the claim is not supported. Those are different problems and the difference matters: the first is bookkeeping, the second is a defect in the thesis.

The test that catches the real problem

Take any number in the thesis. Follow it to a figure, to the code that generated the figure, to the run that produced the data, to the configuration that run used. If any step cannot be taken in under a minute, the chain is broken at that step.

This is worth doing at random, monthly, rather than all at once before submission. Chains break silently, and the cost of repairing one is small; the cost of repairing forty in the last month is not.