Position Bias
The tendency of LLMs to favor sources based on their ordinal position in the retrieval context window rather than quality alone.
A well-documented tendency in large language models to disproportionately cite or prefer sources based on where they appear in the ordered retrieval context, rather than purely on content quality. Research shows positional consistency ranges from 0.565 to 0.828 across models, with the bias intensifying when source quality differences are small.
Also known as
positional bias, position bias in LLMs, retrieval position bias