---
title: "citation amnesia"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "term"
status: "watching"
canonical_name: "citation amnesia"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-25T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["citation analysis","bibliometrics",[["entity-eugene-garfield|Eugene Garfield"]],"obliteration by incorporation"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
---


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 [[entity-eugene-garfield|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.