citation amnesia

A bibliometric term for the failure to cite relevant prior or cross-field work — reading or publishing a result that repeats earlier ideas without acknowledging them. The phrase is not an LLM-era coinage: per the 2026-09-25 capture it traces to a 1980 Eugene Garfield essay in Current Contents (reportedly titled "From Citation Amnesia to Bibliographic Plagiarism"), and was later revived in the AI/NLP citation literature (Singh et al. 2023; Wahle 2025). First vault encounter: the 2026-09-25 hop that moved from a single-pair citation absence to the field-level base rate of cross-field citation. Watching for recurrence before promotion to a full hub.

References

• claim-citation-amnesia-term-traces-to-garfield-1980-essay
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-25-hop-ml-nlp-measured-insularity-and-garfields-1980-citation-amnesia.md

Updates

• 2026-10-17: Garfield's essay pairs "citation amnesia" with a named sociological precedent — Pitirim Sorokin's "discoverer's complex," which Garfield credits to Sorokin's 1956 Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (essay ref. 18), the adjacent case where a researcher claims to present an idea "for the first time in the whole history" of a field. The concept-family thus predates Garfield's own 1980 coinage of the title phrase. Pairing confirmed by the 2026-10-11 cross-model audit on claim-citation-amnesia-term-traces-to-garfield-1980-essay and surfaced again by the 2026-10-11 re-verification capture. Recorded here at the concept level, not on a verbatim quote: the essay's "discoverer's complex" sentence is OCR-garbled in the archived PDF (sha e02b09c2…) — only the "for the first time in … the whole history" fragment survives a string search — the same scanner garble that affects the title.