Terms of use
What you agree to by using Lineage, what it promises, and what it does not. It is short because this is a research tool built and paid for by one person, not a service you are buying.
CURRENT VERSION · 8 August 2026
What Lineage is
You name a term. Lineage reads papers on arXiv around it and lays out how the term developed: the lines of work it split into, the papers that moved it, and typed relationships between specific papers, with a quote from each paper behind every claim.
Two things are stated precisely here, because everything else on this page rests on them and because they are the whole of what the product guarantees.
Which papers group together, which relationships exist and in which direction, which papers mattered most: those are produced by a machine from the evidence shown beside them, and they are labelled as the tool’s reading wherever they appear. A map is one reconstruction of how a term developed. It is not the history of the term, it is not peer review, and it is not a systematic review of a literature.
A quote marked ✓ verified was found word for word in the text this system pulled out of the paper. That check is mechanical and it holds. It is not a check against the published paper, and it says nothing about whether the quote was well chosen or whether the reading beside it is right. Quotes the check could not find are marked and shown, never hidden and never upgraded.
Nothing on this site promises more than those two boxes do. Treat a map as a starting point you can check in seconds rather than as an answer, and when you cite something, cite the paper. How it works sets out the method and its limits in full, and is the honest place to start if you are deciding whether to rely on this.
Whose words these are
The papers and every quote taken from them belong to their authors. Lineage claims no rights in them and grants you none. Full text comes from arXiv, and the metadata and citation sentences from OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar. Your use of that material is subject to those services’ own terms and to whatever license each author chose for their paper; arXiv carries several, and some are more restrictive than others.
Quotes appear here so a claim can be checked against the paper that made it, in the amount that takes and no more. The export exists so you can carry a map’s structure and its citations into your own research writing. Use it for that. Check anything you intend to publish against the paper itself, and credit the paper rather than this site.
Signing in
Every map can be read without an account. Signing in with Google does two things: it lets you request a map of a new term, and it tells the site whether you are the owner, who is the only person able to edit a map today.
What that stores: a handle, not your email address. Google identifies you by address, and Lineage turns that into an opaque handle before anything is written down, because what is written down is permanent: a request you submit is recorded with that handle, the term, and the note you wrote with it, and an edit to a map is recorded with the handle of whoever made it and stays in that map’s audit trail. That trail is permanent on purpose — it is what lets a reader see how much human judgment a map has had — and a map can be exported, so an address there would travel with it. Your name and picture, and the address itself, stay in the session cookie in your browser and go no further. Lineage asks Google for nothing beyond who you are, and writes nothing to your Google account.
Requests are reviewed before they run, because reading a set of papers costs real money in model usage and the owner pays for it. A request can be declined, and there is no undertaking that any request will run or that a map will be kept once built.
No warranty, no liability
Lineage is provided as is and as available, with no warranty of any kind. It may be wrong, incomplete, offline, or withdrawn. Maps can be rebuilt, changed or removed. Nothing on it is professional advice.
The owner accepts no liability of any kind, to the maximum extent the law permits, for anything arising from your use of this site or of anything taken from it, including anything you wrote or published on the strength of a map. Checking what you use is yours to do, and the quotes, the stamps and the links back to arXiv are here so that it takes seconds.
The code’s license is a separate thing
The source is public at gitlab.com/rgok001/lineage under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. That license governs what you may do with a copy of the code. It does not govern this site, and using this site is governed by this page instead. Neither one grants you any rights in the papers or in anything quoted from them.
These terms can change
They can, and this page is always the current version, dated 8 August 2026 at the top. No notice is sent and no archive of older versions is kept here; the repository’s history holds every earlier wording of this page, as it does for the rest of the site.
These terms are written in ordinary language on purpose: terms nobody reads protect nobody, and a tool whose whole point is that you can check it should be able to say what it promises in sentences you can check too. If something here is unclear, or looks wrong, ask on the repository’s issues.