Merton's 1957 paper catalogs sealed deposits, journals' received-dates, and patent-office proposals as the documentary infrastructure that operationalizes priority-norm enforcement

mertonpriority-disputeinstitutional-normssociology-of-sciencedocumentary-methodgeorge-sarton

Beyond the single Newton–Leibniz episode (see claim-merton-1957-newton-leibniz-committee-textbook-institutional-norm-case), Merton's 1957 paper describes a general institutional toolkit built specifically to make priority adjudicable by dated document rather than by reputation: the "long-standing practice of depositing sealed and dated manuscripts with scientific academies in order to protect both priority and idea," the practice by which "scientific journals often print the date on which the manuscript of a published article was received, thus serving... to register the time it first came to notice," and — citing a 1932 proposal by J. Hettinger — the recurring suggestion "that the functional equivalent of a patent-office be established in science to adjudicate rival claims to priority."

Elsewhere in the same essay, quoting George Sarton approvingly, Merton frames this as intrinsic to the historian-of-science role itself: the historian is professionally driven to "fixation of first events" when determining the relative novelty of scientific ideas. Read together, Merton's institutional-norm-enforcement account is not merely analogous to documentary source-criticism-style priority adjudication — it explicitly names dated-document comparison (sealed deposits, received-dates, the historian's own practice) as the machinery through which the institutional norm actually gets enforced, the mechanism question-verify-diplomatics-to-priority-adjudication-descent asks the vault to locate.