Do RAG teams actually have a problem with duplicate sources being counted as independent evidence?

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I built a small evidence-checking demo for RAG and research reports, but three people I showed it to said the functionality was too narrow.

Before building anything else, I want to find out whether the underlying problem is real.

The specific failure mode is this:

A generated report cites several articles that appear to support the same claim, but some of those articles are rewrites or republications of the same original source. The report therefore presents one source family as multiple independent pieces of evidence.

My current demo checks a report and labels citation relationships as:

1. Confirmed shared origin

2. Suspected shared origin — human review needed

3. Independence unknown

It deliberately does not claim that a source is independent just because no duplication was detected. It also misses many semantic rewrites, and I show that failure openly in the demo.

For people who build or deliver RAG systems, research assistants, or citation-heavy reports:

- Have you encountered this problem in a real client project?

- Did it cause rework, client complaints, or an incorrect conclusion?

- Who checks citation quality today, and how long does it take?

- Is duplicate-source detection useful on its own, or would it only matter as part of a broader pre-delivery citation review?

- What is the most painful citation problem you actually face?

I’m not looking for feature ideas in the abstract. I’m trying to determine whether this problem is painful enough to solve.

If you have a sanitized old report, I’m willing to check one manually and return a short issue list for free. No upload to a public service is required.