When we published our 200th article in June, we said we would keep building Spotlight into something you can rely on, cite and find your way around. This autumn we have taken three steps in that direction. Every article now has a permanent digital identifier. The whole archive can be searched with a new tool we call the Navigator. And Spotty, our AI assistant, has moved to a newer model with a clearer voice. Here is what changes for you.

A permanent address for every article

Spotlight now has an ISSN, the international number that identifies a serial publication: 3119-365X. CeFEO has also become a member of Crossref, the registration agency that scholarly publishers use to issue DOIs. Spotlight itself has one, 10.68623/spotlight, and so does every article we publish.

A DOI is a permanent link. It keeps working even if a page moves, which means a Spotlight summary can now be cited like any published work: in a report to the board, a family charter, a course reading list or a policy brief. You will see the change in three places:

• each article page shows its DOI under the authors;
• a new “How to cite this article?” line at the end of each article gives you a ready-made citation, ending with the DOI, for example https://doi.org/10.68623/spotlight.2026.6k8;
• the “Save as a PDF” version shows the DOI next to the publication date and in its citation line, and carries the ISSN in the footer.

One detail matters to us more than the rest. Each registered record links the Spotlight summary to the original study it is based on, in a form that indexing services can read, and states in plain words that the article is a research summary of a study by the named authors. In the registry, the author of each summary is Spotlight by CeFEO. The researchers are credited through their own study. A summary should lead readers to the research, never stand in for it.

All of our roughly 200 published articles have been registered, and every new article receives its DOI as soon as it is published.

The Navigator: the whole archive on one page

With more than 200 articles, scrolling the home page only takes you so far. The Navigator is a new search page for everything we have published. You can narrow the archive by topic, CeFEO author, journal, year and keyword, combine the filters freely, and see at each step how many articles match. Authors and journals can be found by typing the first letters of a name.

The search box looks through titles, summaries and the full text of every article, and shows a short highlighted snippet of where your words appear. Put a phrase in quotation marks to find it exactly, use OR to widen a search, or a minus sign to leave a word out. A search such as “family charter” OR constitution works as you would expect. Results can be sorted by relevance, newest or oldest, and each one opens the article.

Every search also has its own link. Once you have narrowed the archive to the studies that matter for your next family council meeting, bookmark that view or send it to a colleague. On a phone, the filters open from a Filters button.

A new version of Spotty

Spotty, the small lamp in the corner of every page, now runs on Claude Sonnet 5.5 by Anthropic, a newer and more capable model. Before switching, we ran the old and the new version side by side to verify the real improvement. Only then did we make the change. You will notice that answers are easier to read, with short bold lead-ins and bullet points instead of stray formatting symbols. Spotty still answers from Spotlight’s research summaries and links to the articles it draws on, so you can always go back to the source.

We have also made Spotty more open about what it is. In line with the transparency rules of the EU AI Act, it now says plainly that it is an AI assistant, that its answers are generated from our summaries and may contain errors, and that it does not give professional advice. Questions are stored to help us improve Spotty, so please do not share personal details in the chat.

The same openness now applies to the articles themselves. Each one carries a short note explaining that the summary was drafted with the support of AI, reviewed by the authors of the study, and published under the editorial responsibility of Spotlight by CeFEO. We think readers deserve to know how a text was made.

What stays the same

None of this changes what Spotlight is for. Our job is still to take the research produced at CeFEO and make it useful to the people who own, run and advise family businesses. These updates help that work travel further, and make it easier to check where every insight comes from.

Once again, our sincere thanks to the WIFU Foundation for generously supporting Spotlight and making this work possible.

If something does not work as it should, or you would like a feature we have not thought of, write to us through the contact form. We read every message.

Massimo Baù
Director of CeFEO and Editor of Spotlight