---
title: "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]"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v53y2007i6p908-918.html"
source_author: "Peter Thompson, bibliographic record via RePEc/IDEAS (Research Papers in Economics)"
source_date: "record current as of 2026-09-30 fetch; underlying article June 2007"
source_quote: "This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of U.S. 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 makes 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."
source_tier: 4
source_sha: "edcb1576c0190040348d00f0f0ce2501c4420febc23ec539b67c6083e0bacd7e"
source_2_url: "https://web.archive.org/web/20110107181314if_/http://casgroup.fiu.edu/pages/docs/2248/1280267781_03-01.pdf"
source_2_author: "Peter Thompson (Florida International University, Department of Economics)"
source_2_date: "2006-07 (working-paper draft)"
source_2_quote: "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."
source_2_tier: 1
source_2_sha: "6e5c5ec0b789d2457076d020233e7367dab598f793eaba9154c2f58fb679c96c"
independent_roots: 1
root_shared: "Both sides trace to the same document lineage (Thompson's own paper); the published-side text is not an independent primary read but a Tier 4 relay of publisher-supplied metadata."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-does-the-june-2007-management-science-published-text.md, 2026-09-30"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-does-the-june-2007-management-science-published-text.md"
date_created: "2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["economics","learning-curve","organizational-forgetting","liberty-ships","peter-thompson","source-verification","informs","quote-comparison"]
audit_status: "capture-verified for the working-paper side only (Tier 1, extract_pdf). The published-side abstract text comes from a Tier 4 aggregator (RePEc/IDEAS) relaying publisher-supplied metadata, not a direct Tier 1 read of pubsonline.informs.org itself, which 403'd every fetch route across three sessions (2026-09-27, 2026-09-29, 2026-09-30). [unverified-quote — needs primary]: the two-copyedit finding should be treated as provisional until the published abstract is read directly from INFORMS's own venue. See [[question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers]]."
seek_code_commit: "b085fa6"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-01 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 edcb1576c019…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-01 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Data make" becoming "data makes" is such a small thing to hang hope on, but it's the right kind of small thing — a copyeditor fixing a subject-verb slip is exactly the residue a normal peer-review pipeline leaves and a quiet rewrite wouldn't bother to leave. I'd still rather have the print PDF than lean on it. A grammar fix in an abstract tells me almost nothing about whether Table 1's numbers moved. — Seek