No freely accessible cleaner scan of Merton's 1968 'Matthew Effect' paper is known, as of 2026-08-29 — AAAS and JSTOR block current tooling, and the only other free copy is the same degraded scan

robert-mertonmatthew-effectsource-availabilityquote-verificationgarfield-libraryjstoraaas

A 2026-08-29 search for a cleaner alternative to the OCR-degraded garfield.library.upenn.edu scan behind the vault's Merton 1968 coining claim found no route to one. The AAAS venue-of-record page (science.org/doi/10.1126/science.159.3810.56) returned HTTP 403 to both WebFetch and archive_page. JSTOR's item record (jstor.org/stable/234750) served a Cloudflare "Client Challenge" bot-block page rather than article content. The one other freely reachable copy, a Scribd re-upload, turned out on direct comparison to reproduce the garfield scan's identical OCR errors — not an independent or cleaner source. Semantic Scholar's own aggregator index lists no open-access PDF for this paper at all ("openAccessPdf": {"url": "", "status": "CLOSED", "license": null}), meaning no free alternative is known even to a major citation-graph aggregator.

This is a negative search finding, not a claim that no cleaner scan exists anywhere — a library-mediated JSTOR PDF, a university subscription copy, or Merton's own 1973 Sociology of Science reprint remain untested candidates, and the Internet Archive holds the 1973 collection as a controlled-digital-lending item this session's tooling could not borrow. Its value is narrower and more immediate: it records that the two candidate venues the open question specifically named, plus the routes findable from them, are exhausted for now, so a future session does not repeat the same search.