Prompting for Analysis & Research — Quick Check

You ask Claude to ‘make the case for expanding into the mid-market segment’ and get back a confident, well-argued case. What’s the risk in treating this as rigorous analysis?

Two sources in a research synthesis disagree on a key figure. What’s the more rigorous way to handle this in the prompt’s instructions?

A summary you commissioned reads fluently and confidently, but you later realize several ‘facts’ in it were actually the model’s reasonable inferences, not things directly stated in the source. What prompting technique would have prevented this confusion?