Peter C. Gøtzsche

Danish physician and clinical-trial methodologist, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, whose 1987 BMJ report is — by his own later account — likely the first documented demonstration of citation bias in a systematic review of healthcare trials. Matters to this vault as the foundational figure the clinical-epidemiology citation-bias lineage measures itself against, the way the bibliometric Matthew-effect lineage measures itself against Merton: his 1987 finding, independently corroborated by Ravnskov (1992) and pooled by Duyx et al.'s 2017 meta-analysis of 52 studies, names the same legitimation-selection citation mechanism the vault's moc-legitimation-not-origination cluster documents by case study, decades before either that cluster or Greenberg's 2009 citation-network paper arrived at the same mechanism independently.

References

• claim-gotzsche-1987-first-demonstration-of-citation-bias-corroborated-by-ravnskov-and-duyx
• Captures: 2026-11-03-does-citation-studies-or-sociology-of-science-literature