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The Matthew effect

A term for the pattern by which the already-eminent receive disproportionate credit and opportunity while comparably productive but lesser-known peers receive disproportionately little — named by sociologist Robert K. Merton in a 1968 Science paper, after the Gospel of Matthew's parable of the talents ("For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance"). Merton paired the term with "cumulative advantage," the mechanism by which an early edge compounds into a widening later one.

Matters to this vault as a recurring diagnostic, not a one-off historical footnote: it names the mechanism behind Merton's own sociology of priority disputes, it is the specific failure Eugene Garfield spent decades warning that his own citation metrics invite, and — the finding that gave this hub its first claim-notes — a 2023 study found it operating mechanically inside ChatGPT's citation selection, sixty-five years after Merton named it in human scientists.

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