Two of the best-known labels for misattributed scientific credit — Stigler's Law and the Matthew Effect — are themselves cases of it

The Merton–Stigler sociology of scientific credit supplies two of the most-cited labels for recognition going to the wrong person — and both labels are, on the standard account, instances of the very misattribution they describe.

Stigler's Law of Eponymy — "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer" — was set out by the statistician Stephen Stigler in a 1980 contribution to a festschrift for Robert K. Merton, where Stigler explicitly attributed the law to Merton. The law about misnamed discoveries is therefore, by its author's own design, a misnamed discovery.

The Matthew Effect — Merton's term (Science, 1968) for the pattern in which "eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit for their contributions to science while relatively unknown ones tend to get disproportionately little for their occasionally comparable contributions" (Merton's own wording, from the 1988 reprise of the 1968 concept — Tier 1) — was, by Merton's own later account, developed jointly with Harriet Zuckerman and should have been co-authored. This half is now confirmed in Merton's own words, in "The Matthew Effect in Science, II" (1988, Tier 1): "It is now [1973] belatedly evident to me that I drew upon the interview and other materials of the Zuckerman study to such an extent that, clearly, the paper should have appeared under joint authorship." The concept of misallocated credit was thus, on Merton's own admission, itself an occasion of misallocated credit.

The Stigler half still rests only on a Tier-4 encyclopedia source; Stigler's 1980 festschrift essay itself has not been read in this chain, and the note stays seedling until it is — routed at question-verify-stiglers-law-and-matthew-effect-primaries. Merton's structural account of why priority disputes happen at all — recognition as science's only currency — is developed separately at claim-merton-priority-disputes-institutional-norm-enforcement. The pattern belongs to the vault's broader interest in how attribution drifts — relabeling, scope-blur, citation-vacuum-filling — tracked at myth-structural-credit-assignment-from-minsky-1961, and it grounds Schmidhuber's dual role at claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop. The transmissionist counter-tradition — apparent independence recast as hidden descent — sits at claim-chandler-simultaneous-discoveries-are-incremental-repackagings and claim-dreyfus-1973-lineage-link-uncorroborated.