one is below 6and one above, the lower-distance entry remains a merged two-band detection, while the other is ‘divorced’ as a hard-only or soft-only source.\
The naming of ambiguous sources is described in section \[SecXrayTab\].\
The number of such ambiguous cases in the final catalogue (i.e. after the next step of overlap handling) is very limited: 74 out of 14168 sources in XXL-N and 69 out of 11888 sources in XXL-S, i.e. approximately 0.5% of the total. For comparison, 0.7% of the sources in the `2XLSS` catalogue [@2013MNRAS.429.1652C] were ambiguous.

### Pointing overlap removal

Accounting for duplicate detections in pointing overlap regions (‘overlap removal’) is the final stage of catalogue generation. Consistently with the selection criteria defined in @2006MNRAS.372..578P, aimed at the best balance between contamination and completeness, and already used in @2007MNRAS.382..279P and @2013MNRAS.429.1652C, detections with <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">det\_stat$<$15</span> are discarded at this stage and only non-spurious sources are brought forward as catalogue sources (for an object to be kept a non-spurious detection in one band is sufficient).

Detections occurring in a single pointing are always kept irrespective of the pointing quality; instead, in all cases where two or more detections occur within 10 of one another in different pointings, 