Phys.org  May 8, 2024 When a discovery or technique becomes common knowledge, its citations suffer from what Robert Merton called “obliteration by incorporation.” This phenomenon leads to the concept of hidden citations, representing unambiguous textual references to a discovery without an explicit citation to the corresponding manuscript(s). Previous attempts to detect hidden citations have been limited to manually identifying in-text mentions. Researchers at Northeastern University relied on unsupervised interpretable machine learning applied to the full text of each paper to systematically identify hidden citations. They found that for influential discoveries hidden citations outnumber citation counts, emerging regardless of publishing venue […]