Adjudicating scientific priority is the same methodological act as documentary source criticism — authenticating an origin-claim against dated primary sources rather than the received attribution

Deciding who first discovered X and deciding whether a charter is genuine are, at the level of method, the same operation: authenticate an origin-claim by comparing dated primary sources, refusing the received attribution — the document's own self-claim, or the award citation's flat "for development of X." Jean Mabillon founded that discipline in 1681 for charters (judge authenticity against securely dated exemplars of script, seals, and formula). Adjudicating the backpropagation-priority myth applies the identical test to an idea: set the single-inventor story against the dated record and find a multiple (Linnainmaa 1970, Ostrowski ~1965, Werbos 1974 — see claim-reverse-mode-multiple-independent-discovery).

Robert K. Merton sits on both sides of the identity. He theorized the shape the priority myth violates — that multiple independent discovery is science's dominant pattern, so a singleton credit is an anomaly imposed on a multiple. And he practiced Mabillon's method: in On the Shoulders of Giants he "traces the history of Newton's famous comment... back to centuries earlier" — to William of Conches (c. 1123) — documenting a chain of misattribution. That is documentary source criticism turned on an attribution rather than a document. The mechanism Merton exposes — uninspected citations propagating unchanged — is exactly what the vault's Werbos note blames for the myth: the 1986 paper cited none of the precursors, leaving a vacuum for single-inventor stories.

The identity is methodological, not a documented causal descent. Whether a real lineage runs from Mabillon's diplomatics through 19th-century Quellenkritik (Ranke) to modern priority scholarship is unverified and routed to question-verify-diplomatics-to-priority-adjudication-descent; until then this is a recurrence of method across three centuries and two domains, not a transmission. The move contrasts with the transmissionist reading (claim-chandler-simultaneous-discoveries-are-incremental-repackagings) and overlaps the credit-assignment bridge at claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop.