Ogburn & Thomas, "Are Inventions Inevitable?" (1922)

William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas's 1922 "Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution" is the founding empirical study of the multiple-discovery tradition — a catalog of roughly 148 cases of independent simultaneous invention and discovery that the entire Merton/Garfield/Simonton lineage builds on. The vault has cited it repeatedly as the field's origin point (claim-multiple-discovery-concept-was-itself-multiply-discovered, claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop) and it is the lineage against which Tertius Chandler's rival repackaging thesis is measured for its absence in Garfield's 1980 survey, which names Ogburn & Thomas among the standard figures it covers. It had recurred across three claim-notes with no hub of its own until now.

References

• claim-multiple-discovery-concept-was-itself-multiply-discovered
• claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop
• claim-chandler-simultaneous-discoveries-are-incremental-repackagings
• claim-garfield-1980-survey-omits-chandler