Including citations from both file_search tool and web_search tool in the same response

Welcome in the Dev’s Community @RobertoZanolli

My read: the real problem may not be file_search or web_search themselves, but how the combined Responses API output is being flattened / rendered after both tool results are returned.

OpenAI’s structure is tool-based:

Please see the infos on the openai platform

web_search returns a web_search_call plus a message item, with visible text in message.content[0].text and citations in message.content[0].annotations.

file_search is also returned as its own file_search_call, and if you want the actual matched file results, OpenAI recommends include=[“file_search_call.results”].

The Responses API is designed around multiple typed output[] items, not one single text blob.

So my question would be:

Could the real issue be that when both tools fire, the app / SDK / dashboard log renderer is merging multiple output[] items incorrectly, which then causes mid-sentence truncation or malformed inline citation injection?

That would explain why:

each tool works fine alone,

but mixed tool output breaks only when both are present.

If so, the likely failure point is one of these:

parsing the combined output[] structure as plain text too early,

merging annotations and file results into one rendered sentence incorrectly,

a dashboard/log-view serialization issue rather than raw API corruption.

I’d verify this by comparing:

the raw JSON response,

the SDK-parsed object,

and the dashboard/log rendering.

If the raw JSON is clean but the rendered text is broken, then it’s almost certainly a post-processing / rendering-layer issue, not a retrieval issue.

That’s where I would focus first.

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Best