> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.consensus.app/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Find published work on a failure or degradation mechanism > Check whether a defect you are seeing is a known mechanism with a published cause, before you spend a quarter rediscovering it. ## What you get What the literature already reports about your failure mode: proposed mechanisms, the conditions that drive it, published mitigations, and how others detected it — with the citations to hand to your reliability team. ## Who it's for Reliability engineers, failure analysis teams, and process integration groups in semiconductor, automotive, and aerospace manufacturing. ## Why check the literature first Failure and degradation mechanisms are heavily studied academically, often more thoroughly than any single company can afford internally. Checking whether a mechanism is known costs an afternoon; rediscovering it costs a quarter. The literature also gives you the vocabulary — knowing the accepted name for what you are seeing makes every subsequent search work. ## How it works Search what you actually see — the morphology, where it appears, what conditions precede it. Searching your suspected cause finds papers confirming that cause, whether or not it is right. Once results suggest a named mechanism, search that name directly. Field-standard terminology returns far better results than descriptive language, and you rarely know it at the start. The same physical mechanism often appears under a different name in another field. Electromigration, fretting, delamination, and thermal fatigue all cross industries. Widen `domain` deliberately once before narrowing. Both matter. A published mitigation that did not work saves you from trying it. How other groups measured the mechanism tells you what to instrument, and is often the fastest thing to act on. ## The API call ```bash theme={null} curl -G "https://api.consensus.app/v1/search" \ -H "x-api-key: $CONSENSUS_API_KEY" \ --data-urlencode "query=electromigration void nucleation copper interconnect current density" \ --data-urlencode "domain=eng,phys,mat" \ --data-urlencode "include_full_text_chunks=true" \ --data-urlencode "page_size=50" ``` Add `year_min` when the relevant process generation is recent — failure behaviour is often node- or generation-specific, and older literature may describe a materially different structure. ## What to check before you trust it * **Confirm the geometry and scale match.** A mechanism documented at one dimension or process node may behave differently at another, and papers do not always make the regime explicit. * **Check the accelerated-test conditions.** Most reliability literature uses accelerated ageing. The extrapolation back to operating conditions is where the assumptions hide. * **A mechanism that matches your symptoms is a hypothesis.** Several mechanisms produce similar signatures; use the literature to design the discriminating test, not to close the investigation. * **Coverage skews toward open access.** Much of this literature sits in closed conference proceedings, so treat a thin result as inconclusive rather than as evidence the mechanism is unstudied. ## Related Once you know the mechanism, compare materials that resist it. Conditions that avoid the mechanism entirely. Fan-out and merge, and the rest of the primitives. Browse the gallery by persona.