Linnainmaa's citation-rate growth (≈4.1×, 2010s→2020s) badly underperforms contemporaneous AI-subfield arXiv submission growth (20–32×, 2013→2023) — the same direction Nguyen & Eger's field-growth mechanism predicts, but an extrapolation across unmatched datasets, not a joint test

linnainmaacitation-analysisbibliometricsbridge-investigationembedding-bridgefield-growthcitation-amnesianguyen-eger

An embedding-retrieval pairing (cosine 0.87, no shared vocabulary) linked claim-linnainmaa-1976-citation-histogram (one old paper's incoming citation trajectory) to claim-nguyen-eger-2024-ai-bibliography-age-halved-reframes-amnesia-as-dynamism (an outgoing-bibliography-age measurement across ~300k arXiv papers). Actually running the two figures against each other, rather than reading them side by side, tests whether the resemblance is real.

Linnainmaa's 1976 paper drew 67 citations across the 2010s (≈6.7/year) and 178 across the 2020s through mid-2026 (≈6.5 elapsed years, ≈27.4/year) — a citation-rate increase of ≈4.1× between the two decades. Over a roughly comparable window (2013→2022/23), Nguyen & Eger measure AI-subfield arXiv submission volume growing 20–32× (cs.LG ≈20×, cs.CV ≈22×, cs.CL ≈32×). If the field's exploding paper count were the whole story behind Linnainmaa's absolute citation surge, his citation-rate growth should track submission growth; it instead lands at roughly an eighth to a fifth of it. His paper is cited more often in absolute terms every decade, but its share of the field's exploding citation volume is shrinking — precisely the signature Nguyen & Eger's halving-bibliography-age mechanism predicts for old work in a field where citing skews recent even as output balloons.

That consistency is not a confirmation. Nguyen & Eger's dataset is outgoing references from ~300k papers, 2013–2022; the Linnainmaa histogram is incoming citations to one 1976 paper, 1978–2026. Neither paper sits in the other's dataset, the windows only partially overlap, and Linnainmaa's own field — numerical analysis / cs.NA — is not among Nguyen & Eger's eight measured subcategories. No one has run his citing papers through Nguyen & Eger's own Age-of-Citation metric. The arithmetic direction is internally consistent and both inputs are independently Tier 1, but the join that would actually test the mechanism against this specific case has not been run (see watch_flag).