Why is there a CCH and API count mismatch for citations?

Cursory Knowledge

One citation can have no mandates, one mandate, or many mandates.  "Close and lock the door." should be viewed as "Close the door" and "Lock the door" -- or two mandates on one citation.

Citations

The "citations" : [ ] property provides three object types with the same response format (it technically isn't three, but it will help your understanding to consider it being three types):

  1. An object representing a citation without a mandate (also known as a Stub). These can be identified where "control" == null.
  2. An object representing a citation with a mandate. Tied to a Control.
  3. An object representing a citation with another mandate (which duplicates the original citation). Tied to another Control.

You cannot rely on "citations": [ ] object count to match counts in CCH.  There is a new "unique_citations" property in the /authority-document/:id/details that shows you the unique count of citations in a given authority document. This will match the Unique Citations count in CCH.

Example

AD ID 3201 - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) has 67 Unique Citations though there are 77 objects in the "citations" : [ ] property.

1.mceclip0-1

2.cch

 

Your Local System

To achieve unique citations in your local system, de-duplicate based on the "reference"+"guidance" properties. (Special Note: Using only "reference" is not reliable in all cases due to remapping and new versions of documents where the same reference may be leveraged in the new mapping.)

Example

Citation reference "§ 1173(e)(1)" is in the response two times because the "source citation" has two mandates (each mandate is linked to a distinct control). Even though there are two ids, the objects are two representations of the same "source citation". This behavior is by design and is to be expected.

3.mceclip1

4.mceclip2

*Please note that our future API releases will be uniquely distinguishing Citations and Mandates.

Please also refer to:

https://support.commoncontrolshub.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016414252-Why-is-there-duplicate-content-

If you have further questions, please contact Support at support@commoncontrolshub.com; we will gladly assist you.