# When searching in the assistant, the file references seems to be wrong

**URL:** <https://community.openai.com/t/when-searching-in-the-assistant-the-file-references-seems-to-be-wrong/515157>\
**Category:** API\
**Tags:** chatgpt\
**Created:** [November 20, 2023, 2:05pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/when-searching-in-the-assistant-the-file-references-seems-to-be-wrong/515157 "2023-11-20T14:05:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mats1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@mats1](https://community.openai.com/u/mats1)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2023, 2:05pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/when-searching-in-the-assistant-the-file-references-seems-to-be-wrong/515157/1 "2023-11-20T14:05:48Z")

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I am using the assistant and have attached a few documents. When searching for something in the documents I get references back in the information looking like this: 【1†source】【7†source】【9†source】. But no clickable links. I can do “show me document 1” or 7 or 9 but they will all be links to the same document. I can also do “show me source” and it will point to the same document.

But sometimes it shows a clickable link. Why just sometimes?

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**Author:** ![\_j](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/user_avatar/community.openai.com/_j/32/766292_2.png) [@\_j](https://community.openai.com/u/_j)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2023, 2:09pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/when-searching-in-the-assistant-the-file-references-seems-to-be-wrong/515157/2 "2023-11-20T14:09:53Z")

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My theory is that assistants are premature undeveloped boondoggles.

Going off of that, you can assume something is going on like the chunked parts of an embedded document that come from a vector database are still being given the annotation even though it is meaningless to the file retrieval system, and therefore, you must catch and discard those references to non-existent files.

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**Author:** ![kinnari.patwa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/43a26b/32.png) [@kinnari.patwa](https://community.openai.com/u/kinnari.patwa)\
**Post date:** [May 22, 2024, 9:54am UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/when-searching-in-the-assistant-the-file-references-seems-to-be-wrong/515157/3 "2024-05-22T09:54:04Z")

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These sources point to actual files from the vector store. If you check the response message object, you’ll find annotations listed:  
“annotations”: [  
{  
“type”: “file\_citation”,  
“text”: “【10:0†source】”,  
“start\_index”: 918,  
“end\_index”: 951,  
“file\_citation”: {  
“file\_id”: “file-cvrZJnyaEXmyQGVi5jxIiMMr”  
}  
},