The term 'citation amnesia' predates the LLM era, tracing to a 1980 Eugene Garfield essay

citation-analysiscitation-amnesiabibliometricsgarfieldsociology-of-science

The phrase "citation amnesia" — now attached to concern over AI systems and recent NLP citing behaviour — is not a recent coinage. It traces to a 1980 essay by Eugene Garfield in Current Contents #23, June 9, 1980 (reprinted in Essays of an Information Scientist, vol. 4, pp. 503–507), titled "From Citation Amnesia to Bibliographic Plagiarism." The exact phrase appears in the essay's title only, not in its body prose; the body opens by describing the experience the term names — "You know the feeling—while reading an article on a topic related to your own research, you gradually become aware of a strong similarity between the ideas expressed and those you published some time ago," an omission that "can happen when the paper is from a different field" — and later pairs this family of omissions with Pitirim Sorokin's "discoverer's complex." The phrase was later revived in the AI/NLP citation literature (Singh et al. 2023; Wahle 2025). [Flag history: at promotion (2026-10-10) the title and opening carried [unverified-quote] — only a partial body fragment had been grounded at capture. Discharged 2026-10-11: a cross-model audit re-read the PDF directly and confirmed the title, its title-only placement, the opening, and the Sorokin pairing — see question-verify-garfield-1980-citation-amnesia-essay-title-and-opening.]

This is a distinct Garfield essay from the vault's existing 1980 Garfield note, "Multiple Independent Discovery & Creativity in Science" (same Current Contents volume but beginning p.660, a different PDF) — both 1979–80, different essays. The term matters to the vault because it is the historical name for exactly the cross-field silence the citation thread measures in Wahle et al.'s CFDI decline and SciTraj's within-field citation propensities. See entity-citation-amnesia.