How Sciendipity works
Sciendipity helps you browse the bioscience literature and find papers you might
not otherwise come across. It uses PubMed/MeSH and OpenAlex and runs entirely in
your browser. There is no account, no tracking, and your journals, saved papers,
and settings stay on your computer.
The five modes
- Reading Room — Follow journals you read regularly and browse their
papers. You can view the latest papers, open a random issue from the archive, or
move through the issues in a volume using [ and ].
Sciendipity only labels a group of papers as an issue when it can reconstruct an
actual journal issue.
- Today — A new selection of papers each day based mainly on the journals
you follow. It includes five recent papers, three from related journals, two
older papers from the archive, one paper farther outside your usual reading, and
one randomly selected paper from a random year in PubMed.
- Aisles — Browse papers by MeSH subject areas, such as “Cell
structure and dynamics.” You can edit the aisles you want to see. Papers
show the MeSH branch under which they were classified as a major topic.
- Wander — Find papers outside your usual reading. Wander builds a profile
from the journals and papers on your shelf and shows you the terms it is using.
You can pin terms that seem important and remove ones that do not. Each paper
includes an explanation of why it was shown. On Far afield the profile
works in reverse: papers come from rooms — subject wings of the library where
nothing you follow shelves — and from the shelves around your subjects, but
never about them. Your terms are the walls there, not the target.
- My Shelf — Papers you have saved. You can export them as BibTeX or RIS,
copy their DOIs, or back up your complete Sciendipity data from Settings. It is
also the only place in the app where un-sciendipitous activity is allowed: paste
a specific paper’s DOI (PubMed lists one on every record) to add it to
your shelf, where it helps Sciendipity understand your interests.
Every shelf reads two ways: Titles, a dense contents list like a
journal’s own table of contents, and Cards, which add the abstract and
subject chips. The switch sits in each mode’s header; the Reading Room keeps
its own, separate from the other modes’.
Two things to do first
- Follow at least three journals you actually read. Go to Reading Room →
Add journals. These journals will appear in your Reading Room and will also be
used to build the daily selection in Today.
- Get a free OpenAlex API key. Go to
openalex.org/settings/api,
create a free key, and paste it into Settings. No payment information is
required. Settings also shows your current OpenAlex usage. Sciendipity will work
without a key, but the daily allowance for keyless use is limited.
If the shelves stop loading
OpenAlex limits free usage by day. If you reach the daily limit, Sciendipity will
tell you rather than showing an empty shelf. The message “You’ve hit
today’s free usage limit…” means that the OpenAlex allowance has
been used up. The limit resets at midnight UTC.
Where your information is stored
Your followed journals, aisles, saved papers, and settings are stored only in the
browser you are using. Closing the browser, or signing in again when the site asks,
does not lose anything — but a different browser or profile starts fresh. Use
Settings → Export everything to make a backup or move your Sciendipity setup
to another browser. Your OpenAlex API key is not included in the export. Safari can
clear a site’s storage if you don’t visit for a week or so — if Safari is
your browser, keep a backup, or install Sciendipity from the share menu.
If something looks wrong, or you have an idea for improving the app, use
Settings → Report a problem or idea. Reports about unexpected or odd results
are especially useful.