Research guide

Tips for theological and literary research. Search effectively, understand similarity scores, and export your findings.

Writing effective queries

Golden Thread uses semantic search: it finds passages by meaning, not keywords. This changes how you should search.

Describe the concept, not the term

Less effective

"transubstantiation"

Finds passages that happen to discuss the term, but misses related passages that use different language.

More effective

"how bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ"

Finds passages across Scripture, Fathers, Councils, and Catechism that discuss the concept from different angles.

Ask questions, not keywords

Less effective

"natural law Aquinas"

More effective

"what is the natural law according to Aquinas and how does it relate to divine law"

Longer, question-form queries give the embedding model more context to match against.

Try multiple formulations

Semantic search finds different passages depending on how you phrase the question. For thorough research, search the same concept in 2–3 different ways and compare results.

Understanding results

Similarity scores

Press Shift+Ctrl+D to open the debug panel, then enable "Show internals" to see how closely each result matches your query. Scores range from 0 (no match) to 1 (perfect match).

0.85+ — Very strong semantic match
0.70–0.85 — Good match, worth reading
0.55–0.70 — Tangential, may have relevant context
Below 0.55 — Weak match, likely noise

Document IDs

Each result has a stable document ID visible when the debug panel is open. IDs follow the pattern collection/source/identifier. These IDs are permanent and can be used in citations.

Collection coverage

Collection	Sources	Status
Scripture	Douay-Rheims Bible	Complete
Catechism	CCC, Baltimore Catechism	Complete
Councils	Vatican II documents	Complete
Fathers	Apostolic Fathers, Internet Archive patristic corpus	Growing
Literary	Chesterton, Belloc, Hopkins, Thompson, Newman, Pascal, Dante, Milton, Chaucer	Growing
Theology	Summa Theologica, theological works	Growing
Artists	Living Catholic artists (seed data)	Seed

Limitations to know

No full-text — Golden Thread indexes chunks (paragraphs or short passages), not complete works. Use "Read at source" to see the full context.
No cross-references — Results are independent passages. We don't yet link related passages across collections.
No keyword search — If you need an exact phrase match, this tool searches by meaning. A passage must be semantically close, not just contain your words.
Chunk boundaries — Passages may start or end mid-thought due to chunking. Always click through to the source for full context.
Embedding model — We use multilingual-e5-small (384-dimensional, 100 languages). Cross-language search is supported — you can query in English and find Latin, Greek, or other-language passages. Results for highly specialized terminology may be less precise than for natural-language queries.

Export and citation

Use the ☆ Pin button to collect results, then export as CSV or Markdown from the partner workspace (available with partner authentication). Each export includes document IDs, citations, source URLs, and passage text.

Start searching →