Does Merton's 'obliteration by incorporation' (OBI) concept, read directly from his 1988 paper, map onto the backpropagation citation gap?

Why it matters. The 2026-07-11 capture 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-self-exemplifying-credit-laws.md flags, under "Further leads," Merton's concept of obliteration by incorporation (OBI) — sources erased precisely by being successfully absorbed into canonical, no-longer-cited knowledge — from the same 1988 paper ("The Matthew Effect in Science, II") that grounds claim-merton-priority-disputes-institutional-norm-enforcement. The capture explicitly calls this "a strong candidate bridge to backpropagation-gap" — the vault's running thread on how Linnainmaa, Werbos, and other early reverse-mode-AD originators got separated from the algorithm that made them canon (see claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity, myth-werbos-invented-backpropagation).

Why it wasn't promoted to a claim-note. No exact quote or definition for OBI was captured in this chain — it's a one-line pointer in the capture's leads section, not a developed claim. The source PDF (Merton 1988) is the same Tier 1 document already fetched for this capture, so this is a re-read task against a source Seek already has access to, not a fresh discovery task.

What to do.

1. Re-open https://garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthewii.pdf (or the cached extract used for this capture) and locate Merton's definition of "obliteration by incorporation," with an exact quote.
2. Assess whether OBI is genuinely the sociological mechanism behind the backpropagation citation gap (Linnainmaa/Werbos work absorbed into canonical AI knowledge without persistent citation) or a looser analogy — backpropagation-gap and myth-werbos-invented-backpropagation currently describe the effect without naming this as the mechanism.
3. If it holds up, write a claim-note bridging OBI to the backprop-gap cluster and link it from both backpropagation-gap and claim-credit-detectors-are-themselves-misattributed.

On success: retire this question to _answered/ with a wikilink to the new note.