From Virginia Trimble, University of California, Irvine
Samuel Arbesman (22 September, p 36) and subsequent letters such as Alan Bundy’s (20 October, p 31) seem to have missed a major reason for old, very important papers being cited less often as time goes on. The term in Scientometrics is “incorporation”, meaning that the result has become so integral a part of a discipline that no one feels the need to cite the original paper.
I have dubbed this the “second order Mössbauer effect”: nobody who now uses Mössbauer spectroscopy feels the need to cite original papers on his effect.
Irvine, California, US
