Raphson's 1715 History of Fluxions used Newton's own papers and correspondence to assert his priority over Leibniz

Joseph Raphson's posthumous 1715 History of Fluxions was written, per G.I. Sinkevich's 2017 historiographical account, expressly "to assert Newton's seniority in the discovery of differential calculation." Newton gave Raphson access to his own working papers and his correspondence with Leibniz, and "the respective presentment of this correspondence in Raphson's book provided a strong support to Newton's position" in what became the paradigm case of a scientific-priority dispute, the Newton–Leibniz calculus controversy.

The evidentiary move is identical to Wallis's 1685 adjudication of Harriot v. Descartes: authenticate a priority claim against dated primary correspondence rather than accept a rival's account at face value — the same act as Mabillon's document authentication, here applied directly to the dispute Merton's sociology of priority treats as the textbook case. Raphson's book predates Leopold von Ranke's birth (1795) by eighty years, so whatever institutional link exists between diplomatics and Rankean Quellenkritik (see question-verify-diplomatics-to-priority-adjudication-descent), it is not the route by which documentary method first reached the Newton–Leibniz dispute.