KER evidence triage

A KER can be completely uncited. At the time this skill was written (09-03-2026), the AOP-Wiki XML export — the 08-06-2026 snapshot — held 2,369 KERs, of which 738 (31%) carry references and the other 1,631 (69%) carry none. A KER with an empty evidence block still renders as a clean arrow between two named events, and nothing in the console output distinguishes it from a well-supported one.

This is the procedure for finding out which you have. It changes what the rest of the work costs, so run it before committing deep-research effort, not after — it is a prioritization gate, not a post-hoc note.

Reaching the records is the aop-wiki skill's job — read it for the CLI, the date footgun, and the entity shapes. This skill is what you do with a KER once you have one.

The 29.41% rule

completion_score.percent == 29.41 on a KER means the record is an empty stub: endpoints and identifiers, nothing else. This is exact, not a heuristic. In the 08-06-2026 snapshot 1,536 of 2,369 KERs (65%) sit at that value and zero of them carry a single reference. It is also the corpus median, so most of AOP-Wiki's causal edges are assertions with nothing behind them.

One number, read before anything else, tells you whether the KER has content. A stub KER is not disqualified — but it means AOP-Wiki is contributing a hypothesis and no evidence, and every citation will have to be found from scratch. Rank the work accordingly, and say so when you report the plan.

The evidence fields

For each KER you are assessing, read three fields on ker_info and one on its parent AOP:

Field	On	What it tells you
references	KER	whether any literature is attached to this edge
weight_of_evidence.free_text	KER	whether anyone assessed the edge
empirical_support.free_text	KER	whether experimental support is described
oecd_status	AOP	whether the pathway was ever externally reviewed

Three traps live here.

completion_score is not a quality score. It counts populated fields on the wiki record. AOPs 552, 555, 556, 558 and 560 score 94–100% complete, have never been OECD reviewed (oecd_status: ""), and every one of their KERs sampled in a cardiac Na/K-ATPase and phosphodiesterase sweep carries zero references. High completeness on an unreviewed pathway is the most misleading state in the data.

The 29.41% value makes the same point more sharply, and provably. ker_completion_score() scores 17 fields unconditionally, so 5/17 is the only route to that percentage. The five are aop_ids plus the four evidence blocks — which the parser always builds as three-key dicts, and which _has_content() scores on len(dict) > 0, so a wholly empty evidence block still counts as populated. references is a separate scored field, so a KER carrying any reference scores at least 35.29%. "Zero of them carry a single reference" is therefore guaranteed by the scoring function, not merely observed in this snapshot.

An empty oecd_status is not a rejection. 450 of 596 AOPs are empty. It means no review has happened. Endorsement raises confidence in a pathway; its absence is not evidence against one, and neither state substitutes for literature.

AOP-level references do not discharge a KER. The AOP record carries a references HTML blob — real citations, often substantial. They attest to the pathway as a whole and cannot be attributed to any specific causal step. Treat them as a starting bibliography for primary-literature verification, never as the citation for an edge.

Map the AOP's citations onto its own steps

An AOP carries a references blob even when its KERs carry nothing. Do not stop at counting it. Split it into individual citations and assign each one to the step it actually serves — upstream, this edge, downstream, or none.

Two things fall out that a count cannot show.

Whether the author evidenced this step at all. AOP 558 carries ten citations and not one measures cAMP after PDE inhibition — the edge the AOP is named for. Four are enzyme-background or therapy reviews, four belong to the downstream RyR2/calcium half, one is tangential, one has no evident connection to the pathway. The bibliography is real and the step is still unevidenced.

Whether the bibliography contradicts the pathway. In the same list, Zhou 2017 attributes RyR2 hyperphosphorylation to oxidative-stress-driven calpain activation — a competing mechanism to the cAMP/PKA route asserted by the very next KER. An AOP citing evidence against its own edge is a strong signal to verify that edge before curating it, and you only see it by reading the citations rather than counting them.

Recording the result

Record the triage result per edge. An uncited KER is not disqualified — it is a claim you will have to source entirely yourself, and knowing that up front is the point.

Whatever the triage says, the edge still needs its own primary literature before it can be curated. AOP-Wiki is never a dismech reference: there is no AOP: prefix in references_cache/, no fetcher, and no cacheable body for a snippet to match. See dismech-references.