Alroy and Chao & Jost each claim priority for coverage-standardized richness estimation, and dispute whether 'coverage-based rarefaction' is a rename of Alroy's method or an independent contribution

statistics-of-the-unseensample-coveragerarefactionpaleobiologyshareholder-quorum-subsamplingcoverage-based-rarefactionjohn-alroyanne-chaopriority-and-lineage

Chao and Jost's 2012 paper credits Alroy with priority on the core insight behind coverage standardization, writing that estimates standardized by coverage "preserve an important property of species richness, a kind of replication principle, as first noted by Alroy (2010a) and Jost (2010)." Alroy's own account, on his lab website, goes further and frames "coverage-based rarefaction" (CBR) as a renaming of his prior work rather than an independent contribution: "The general idea of quorum subsampling and my name for it were both first published in my 2009 GSA abstract." He continues: "Chao and Jost (2012) went on to rename the method 'coverage-based rarefaction'. Ecologists continue to use that name and attribute the method to them. But there shouldn't be a priority issue here — SQS is not 'rarefaction' in any sense... I certainly have name priority in addition to general priority."

Both primaries agree on the sequence — Alroy's 2009 abstract predates the 2012 CBR paper — but disagree on what it means. Chao and Jost frame their paper as deriving something new (the closed-form equation, see claim-chao-jost-2012-calls-alroys-sqs-a-different-algorithmic-technique-from-their-closed-form-estimator) atop an idea Alroy and Jost had already both noted; Alroy frames the episode as ecologists renaming, and then crediting to themselves, a method he had already built and named. This is a fresh instance of the vault's recurring priority-dispute pattern — Merton's account of priority disputes as structural, not personal, and the same documentary-comparison method adjudicating priority elsewhere in the vault applies here too: dated primaries agreeing on sequence, disagreeing on significance.