A full direct read of Merton's founding 1957 priority-disputes paper confirms no mention of Ranke, Mabillon, or Quellenkritik anywhere in its text

mertonquellenkritikrankehistoriographypriority-disputeunverified

claim-no-documented-chain-found-from-quellenkritik-to-modern-priority-adjudication recorded a Tier-4 Wikipedia-search negative result: "[t]argeted searches... returned no source establishing" a documented chain from Ranke's Quellenkritik to modern scientific-priority adjudication. This note closes one specific, plausible gap in that prior search: whether Merton's own priority-founding text — the paper that supplies the vault's institutional-norm-enforcement claim in the first place — might itself be the missing link, silently citing Ranke or Quellenkritik while discussing how historians fix priority. It does not. All 26 pages and roughly 90 footnotes of the 1957 paper were read directly, and its citations for "historian of science" material run to Sarton, I. B. Cohen, and Alexandre Koyré — not to Ranke, Niebuhr, or the Quellenkritik tradition by name, even in the passage (see claim-merton-1957-documentary-infrastructure-catalogue-for-priority-norm-enforcement) most directly concerned with how historians establish "first events."

This is a first-hand negative check against the single most obvious candidate primary source, independent of and stronger than the 2026-07-31 Wikipedia search — Tier 1 direct read against Tier 4 secondary search — and it corroborates rather than overturns the existing finding: see entity-leopold-von-ranke and question-verify-diplomatics-to-priority-adjudication-descent, which remains open on its specific Mabillon→Ranke→priority-adjudication route.