The serendipity contract

If a keyword alert would have found it, it is not in the digest. A connection is delivered only when all four clauses below hold. If one fails, the connection is not sent. Some clauses are checked by code. Others are checked by a person.

1. It spans two sources and two fields.

The two items come from different sources, and their fields differ. A paper’s field comes from its primary OpenAlex domain. Every other source maps to a field through a fixed table.

2. A keyword search on either side would not have found the pair.

The title and keyphrase overlap between the two items must stay below a threshold. That threshold is set so a keyword baseline misses the pair. The pair must also be absent from the top 20 results of a lexical search seeded by either item’s title.

3. Both sources contain quoted evidence.

The verifier returns at least one quote from each item. Each quote must match the stored source text after whitespace and Unicode normalisation. A quote that does not match rejects the connection, whatever the verifier said about it.

4. Nobody has publicly linked them before.

The index is checked for an existing citation, a shared link, or a co-mention of both items. The final shortlist also gets a web search for a prior public link. An editor confirms the pair before it can be sent.

How the contract is enforced

Clauses 1 and 2 are checked by code before any language model reads the pair. The quote check in clause 3 runs on the verifier’s output, and it is a string match, not a second model’s opinion. Clause 4 combines an index check, a web search on the shortlist, and an editor’s confirmation.

No connection is sent or published until a person has approved it. In this version, that person is the founder.

The contract is audited with an evaluation harness, and the rate at which it holds is tracked as a product metric. No rate is published on this page until it has been measured.

What the contract does not promise

Serendib claims relevance, not prediction. A connection says two sources bear on each other in a way a search would miss. It does not say what will happen next.

A quote shows what a source says. It does not prove the link holds. A connection can be wrong, and each connection page gives the analyst a next step to check.

Nothing here is investment, legal, or scientific advice. An example on this site that is not from the published archive carries a visible ILLUSTRATIVE label.

Read further

The method explains how candidates are generated and scored. The archive shows connections as they were sent, one week after each issue.