F.1:10 - Rationale

Finding is useful when the question and the source’s wording do not yet meet. An exact address or lexical lookup is sufficient when it reaches the needed content. Variants and complementary routes earn their extra cost by exposing material that the first route could miss. Restoring the original conditions during inspection prevents broader discovery from changing the question. Returning source context and actual access prevents a compact finding aid from supplying claims it never showed.

Source selection for conceptual work is neither statistical sampling nor a race to the largest bibliography. The receiving question determines which source differences matter. A source belongs in the active cut when an inspected claim can change the answer, expose a rival or counterexample, or mark where transfer fails.

This keeps the useful part of purposive and iterative sampling—selection for a stated analytic purpose—without importing another field’s population, richness scale, saturation claim, or count convention. It also keeps the useful part of systematic-search and AI-assisted screening—recoverable searches and efficient candidate discovery—without treating search coverage, rank, or reporting conformance as source adequacy.