Forum Discussion
Researcher - Formating Issues
I have a serious issue to force Researcher to follow a specific format concerning citation within his response. Although it delivers a superior content, it does not comply with neither the instructions (word file) nor the template nor the prompt concerning the citations. I want clickable (hyperlinked) citations throughout the text that will be listed in a references section at the bottom of the report. I re-engineered instructions, template and prompt 100s of times according to it's own suggestions without success. It always miss something. I also prompted "not to synthesize anything untill the Template and Instructions rules applied". Again failed. Are other folks having similar challenges? Did you found any tips or tricks to force Researcher to comly in formating requests?
3 Replies
Solved. After many experiments, I figured out that the prompt and the instructions must be well visually identified and captured (e.g. instructions separated with line breaks and bullets or grouped). When I asked copilot for this, it verified this empirical finding. The causality is that large language models can partially fail when prompted with compacted texts paying most attention to the begining or end of the prompt only. Very impressive and not self explained. The response to the formating instructions was outstanding when I re-engineered the prompt so that to provide spot instructions visually separated with line breaks and segments. Hope this will help others (it took me 1 week intensive trial and error testing)
Would you be willing to share your prompt?
It sounds like you may have saved a lot of us a lot of time and effort if we can learn from your experience.This is a sample prompt of the project I am working on. I used also word templates and instructions files with the same format. I unfortunatelly tried TO DISPATCH THE PROMPT PROGRAMMATICALLY. Means not formated prompt not well understood by copilot. This gave me head scratz for almost a week. Hope it helps.
For each jurisdiction:
- Assign a risk level (High, Medium, Low, Unknown, Deadline Risk) per ERI-Instructions.
- Use only the URLs in Column3 as primary sources.
- Supplement with approved portals and intelligence platforms listed in ERI-Instructions.
- Do not cite or mention the Excel file anywhere in the report.
Formatting:
- Follow ERI-Template exactly (headers, infographic, symbols, layout).
- Use Chicago-style inline citations with embedded hyperlinks.
- Include: infographic, key findings, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction assessments, summary table, risk level definitions, footnotes, and references.
Compliance:
- All citations must be from Column3 URLs or approved external sources.
- Excel file is a filter only—never a source.
- Any citation of the Excel file renders the report non-compliant.
