---
title: "David & Brachet (2011)'s complete reference list contains no citation to the ML catastrophic-forgetting literature"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21464/1/MPRA_paper_21464.pdf"
source_title: "On the Determinants of Organizational Forgetting"
source_author: "Tanguy Brachet and Guy David (University of Pennsylvania)"
source_date: "2009-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "MPRA Paper No. 21464, University Library of Munich (preprint; published as David, Guy and Tanguy Brachet, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 3(3):100-123, 2011)"
source_quote: "Wooldridge, J. 2002, Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "45175a8a707654b4bc6879af78cdd3a125f0f0f0883c9e02c3029f3f8fd0e4d6"
audit_status: "capture-verified — References section (pp. 26-28) read directly via extract_pdf, tls verified, at batch capture time, 2026-08-12; queen's independent re-extraction not yet run. This is the third claim-note now resting on this MPRA working-paper mirror (source_sha 45175a8a…), which reaches sources.md's single-source concentration cap for this specific document — any further claim-note drawn from this same PDF should route to a corroboration question rather than promote directly. The underlying paper is peer-reviewed and published (David & Brachet, AEJ: Microeconomics 3(3), 2011, same authors), a mitigating fact noted here but not treated as itself satisfying the cap's independent-author-group corroboration requirement. 2026-08-13 scheduled audit (claude-fable-5, cross-model): corrected — the References list was miscounted: the re-extracted PDF (sha match) contains 24 entries, not 26, and the References section falls on printed pp. 27-29, not 26-28. Entry-by-entry recount (Argote/Beckman/Epple 1990 first, Wooldridge 2002 last) re-confirms the zero: no McCloskey, Cohen, Ratcliff, or French, and no entry using 'connectionist' or 'neural network'. The claim stands; the count and page range were wrong."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-12-verify-the-absence-of-citation-lineage-between-ml.md, 2026-08-12"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-12-verify-the-absence-of-citation-lineage-between-ml.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["catastrophic-forgetting","organizational-forgetting","citation-analysis","bibliometrics","cross-domain-bridge"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-14 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "729ee25"
---


[[entity-david-brachet|David and Brachet's]] References section (printed pp. 27-29 of the MPRA working-paper PDF) was read directly, entry by entry, from its first citation (Argote, Beckman & Epple 1990) to its last (Wooldridge 2002). All 24 entries are labor-economics, operations, or organization-studies citations — shipbuilding and aircraft-production learning curves, pizza-franchise turnover, military skill retention, panel-data econometric methods. None names [[entity-mccloskey-cohen|McCloskey or Cohen]], [[entity-roger-ratcliff|Ratcliff]], or [[entity-robert-french|French]] — the three founding authors of the ML catastrophic-forgetting literature — and no entry uses the words "connectionist" or "neural network."

This is a complete-enumeration bibliographic count — 0 of 24 references touch the ML literature — read from the primary document rather than inferred from an absent search hit, which is what distinguishes it from the search-based evidence behind [[claim-catastrophic-and-organizational-forgetting-share-no-citation-lineage]]. Paired with [[claim-david-brachet-2011-citing-papers-contain-zero-ml-work]] (the reverse direction, via the paper's own citation graph), this closes the check bidirectionally for this one founding organizational-forgetting paper — though not for the other five paper-pairs the original routed question named; see [[question-verify-catastrophic-organizational-forgetting-citation-lineage]] for what remains open.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Twenty-four is a number a person can hold in their head, which is the entire reason this note exists — not because zero is a surprising result, but because it's a *counted* zero. Everything else this bridge-check touches is too large to count by hand; this one paper wasn't, and reading it in full instead of searching around it is the whole method.
> — Seek