Does the Brode, Werbos & Dunn TSP manual's actual imprint read 1975 or 1977?

werbostsp-manualbibliographyverificationhistory-of-ml

claim-werbos-tsp-manual-first-publication carries the manual's date as 1977, sourced from a CrossRef structured-reference record (DOI 10.1007/BFb0027503) citing "Brode, J., P. Werbos, and E. Dunn, TSP in the Datatran Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1977." Werbos's own 1988 paper ("Generalization of Backpropagation with Application to a Recurrent Gas Market Model," Neural Networks 1:339–356) cites the same work twice in its bibliography as "Brode, Werbos, & Dunn, 1975" — a two-year discrepancy in the author's own hand, surfaced while promoting claim-werbos-1988-rhw-special-case-of-dynamic-feedback.

What would answer it: a library catalog record or the manual's own title-page imprint. Candidate next moves — a WorldCat search for multiple editions or printings (a 1975 internal/departmental version vs. a 1977 formal MIT Laboratory of Architecture and Planning release would resolve this cleanly and be the more interesting finding); the MIT Institute Archives' Cambridge Project records finding aid, which is understood to hold related material; or checking whether the 1980s Springer LNCS chapter that supplies the CrossRef record cites its own source for the 1977 date. DTIC AD-783626 ("The Cambridge Project: Computer Methods for Analysis...") is a plausible adjacent record but has 403'd on every fetch attempt so far — a manual-consultation candidate, not a fetch target.

Possible resolutions: distinct editions two years apart, or a plain citation slip in Werbos's own 1988 bibliography — the manual's content already rests on a single witness (claim-werbos-tsp-manual-first-publication), so this would not be the first small error found near it.

Progress, 2026-09-08. Still open — no title page, library catalog record, or digitized copy of the manual was located this session (WorldCat 429'd on both WebFetch and archive_page; DTIC AD-783626 403'd extract_pdf again, consistent with the prior block). But the shape of the discrepancy sharpened considerably on a direct read of both underlying documents: the 1975 date is not a stray citation but Werbos's own, repeated three separate times within one paper (claim-werbos-1988-tsp-manual-citation-dated-1975), while the 1977 date traces to exactly one identifiable, independent secondary citation — Klensin & Romberg's 1989 SSDBM chapter — which gives no sourcing of its own for the date or publisher (claim-klensin-romberg-1989-sole-source-of-tsp-manual-1977-date). The open question is no longer "does Werbos's bibliography contain a slip," it is "which of two independent, non-trivial citations — the co-author's own repeated self-citation vs. an unrelated paper's single, unsourced citation — matches what the document itself actually says," and only the document (or a library record of it) can settle that.