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copy-fingerprint test

A diagnostic for citation-trail claims: ask whether the trail contains an error or quirk so improbable that only one specific ancestor could have transmitted it. Simkin & Roychowdhury (2002) established the method for human citation practice — identical misprints across citing papers are statistically too improbable to arise independently, so "repeat misprints are due to copying some one else's reference, without reading the paper in question." A correct citation carries no such fingerprint and so cannot, by this logic alone, distinguish independent discovery from copying.

Matters to this vault as a recurring, load-bearing test for adjudicating bipartite-hop pairings between citation-tracing claims. First named and applied in observation-copy-fingerprint-logic-explains-why-kwakernaak-1977-trail-cannot-date-song-jians-acquisition (2026-09-24), contrasting Ansari's Contamination Inheritance (which has a fingerprint, n=1) against the Kwakernaak-1977 citation trail (which has none). Applied a second time in observation-chainqueen-ansari-contamination-inheritance-cosine-085-pairing-is-hedged-bridge (2026-10-10), this time contrasting Ansari's single fingerprint against a case that doesn't need one at all — ChainQueen's citation to Sulsky/Schreyer, independently corroborated outside the citation chain — sharpening the test's scope: it matters only when citation-chain evidence is the sole evidence available.

Applied a third time in observation-ansari-griewank-contamination-inheritance-cosine-086-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend (2026-10-16), against DiffTaichi's citation of Griewank & Walther (2008). Unlike the ChainQueen case, no asymmetry-in-evidence survives to hedge over here: DiffTaichi's citation is to an openly checkable textbook, needs no corroborating second leg, and so carries no fingerprint to assess at all — yielding this cluster's first clean false-friend verdict rather than another hedge.

Ansari's own paper names the matching, unperformed capability directly: "training-data audits, version-controlled corpus tracking, and citation genealogy mapping" (§4.8.1) — the LLM-training-era cousin of the same method.

References

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