Thompson's June 2007 published abstract, as relayed by RePEc/IDEAS, differs from the July 2006 working-paper abstract by exactly two copyedits and no substantive change [unverified-quote — needs primary]

economicslearning-curveorganizational-forgettingliberty-shipspeter-thompsonsource-verificationinformsquote-comparison

The July 2006 working paper's abstract reads, in full: "This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of US wartime ship production. Estimates obtained using data constructed from primary sources at the National Archives yield rates of forgetting that are much smaller than previously reported, and may well be zero. The richness of the data make it possible to control for variations in the product mix, to explore alternative formulations for the learning curve, and to investigate the relationship between organizational forgetting and labor turnover."

The abstract RePEc/IDEAS records for the published Management Science article is the same text with two small differences: "US" becomes "U.S." (punctuation), and "The richness of the data make it possible" becomes "The richness of the data makes it possible" (a subject–verb agreement correction — the working draft has a grammatical error that the published version appears to fix). No wording was added, removed, or substantively changed.

This is treated with the same discipline as a quantitative or mechanism claim, because it is a load-bearing precision claim about exact wording, and the published-side text is a Tier 4 relay rather than a direct read of the journal's own page — pubsonline.informs.org has 403'd every fetch attempt across three consecutive sessions. [unverified-quote — needs primary]: whether RePEc/IDEAS's relayed text is itself letter-perfect against the printed page is unconfirmed. If it holds, it is consistent with — though not proof of — a published version that underwent only light copyediting between draft and print, at least at the abstract level; see claim-thompson-2007-published-article-and-working-paper-are-bibliographically-identical for the companion bibliographic-identity finding and question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers for the still-open question of whether the body text — the six point estimates, the Argote/Beckman/Epple comparison, and the Fischer (1949) passage in claim-thompson-2007-liberty-ship-forgetting-rate-is-specification-sensitive-by-his-own-evidence, claim-thompson-2007-re-estimate-is-one-fifth-to-one-seventh-of-argote-1990-25-percent-figure, and claim-thompson-2007-attributes-inflated-forgetting-estimate-to-fischer-1949-aggregation-bias — survived unchanged.