---
title: Changelog - Scholar Sidekick
description: Public record of changes to Scholar Sidekick's transform and verifier pipelines. Each entry is tagged output-affecting, verdict-affecting, breaking, or non-breaking.
doc_version: "1.0"
last_updated: "2026-05-22"
---

# Changelog - Scholar Sidekick

> Public record of changes to Scholar Sidekick's deterministic pipelines.
> Last updated: 2026-05-22
> HTML version: https://scholar-sidekick.com/changelog

Two version tags let a client pin behaviour over time and detect drift:

- `x-scholar-transform-version` - the normalisation, formatting, and resolver chain. Mirrored in
  [/.well-known/sources.json](https://scholar-sidekick.com/.well-known/sources.json).
- `x-scholar-verify-version` - the citation-verifier pipeline (claimed-vs-resolved comparison,
  thresholds, similarity primitives). Emitted on `/api/verify` routes only.

A version tag is bumped only when a change could alter byte-identical output (transform) or a
verdict (verify) for the same input. Each entry is tagged **output-affecting**,
**verdict-affecting**, **breaking**, or **non-breaking**.

**For agents:** record `x-scholar-transform-version` (and `x-scholar-verify-version` for
`/api/verify` calls) alongside any cached output. If either value changes, re-run cached
comparisons or re-baseline your expected outputs.

---

## 2026-05-22

### transform_version: 2026-05-04 → 2026-05-22 — output-affecting

Re-baselined to reflect resolver and normalisation refinements shipped since the previous baseline.
Output for affected identifiers may differ from the `2026-05-04` baseline:

- arXiv author-name parsing now detects the comma form (`"Family, Given"`) explicitly, fixing a
  family/given swap and a trailing-comma artifact for arXiv items.
- HTML and entity markup (e.g. `<i>`, `&amp;`) is stripped from titles and container titles for
  similarity comparison and clean display.
- ISSN / eISSN container-only input lines are handled distinctly from paper-level lookups.
- ADS, ISBN, and CSL adapter fixes that can change resolved metadata for some inputs.

Output is deterministic at `transform_version=2026-05-22` going forward. If you pinned expected
output against the previous baseline, re-baseline against the current version.

### verify_version: 2026-05-11 → 2026-05-22 — verdict-affecting

- Sufficiency guard: single-token claims with no identifier return `not_found` with
  `skipped_reason: "insufficient_claim"` instead of a misleading high-confidence verdict.
- Family/given author-swap detection in first-author similarity scoring, as defence-in-depth
  against transposed names.

---

## 2026-05-04

### Determinism contract published (initial transform_version) — non-breaking

First published `transform_version`. Established the byte-identical-output guarantee, the
unconditional `x-scholar-transform-version` response header, the
[/.well-known/sources.json](https://scholar-sidekick.com/.well-known/sources.json) resolver-chain
manifest, and the [verification kit](https://scholar-sidekick.com/verification).

---

## Related

- [Engineering Principles](https://scholar-sidekick.com/engineering-principles)
  ([markdown](https://scholar-sidekick.com/engineering-principles.md)) - the determinism contract
  and when `transform_version` is bumped
- [Verification](https://scholar-sidekick.com/verification)
  ([markdown](https://scholar-sidekick.com/verification.md)) - copy-paste curl commands that verify
  these guarantees against the live API
- [Data source manifest](https://scholar-sidekick.com/.well-known/sources.json) - resolver chain,
  fallback order, and the current `transform_version`

---

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://scholar-sidekick.com/sitemap.md) for all pages.