Steven A. Greenberg

Physician-researcher who built and published a complete citation network — 242 papers, 675 citations — tracing how a single biomedical claim (that β-amyloid is produced by and injures muscle in inclusion body myositis) spread and distorted through citation alone, in "How Citation Distortions Create Unfounded Authority: Analysis of a Citation Network" (BMJ 339:b2680, 2009). Matters to this vault as the source of "citation transmutation" — a hedge silently dropped at the point of citation, hardening a hypothesis into unqualified fact — the first peer-reviewed, named account this vault has found for the mechanism it had already documented by hand in the Ivakhnenko/Schmidhuber "perhaps" case.

References

• claim-greenberg-2009-citation-transmutation-names-hedge-erosion-mechanism — the citation-transmutation finding, Tier 1
• claim-greenberg-2009-citation-bias-names-selective-ignoring-of-contrary-data — the same paper's separately-named citation-bias finding, Tier 1
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-sociology-of-science-or-citation-analysis-literature.md

Updates

• 2026-11-06: His 2009 Discussion section reaches for a compounding, history-dependent explanation of his own citation-bias finding — "certain mathematical properties of information cascades (preferential attachment) would be expected to produce a network with properties seen here" — which a bridge comparison against Alemohammad et al.'s 2026 recursive citation-dilution benchmark found to be the opposite of that benchmark's own designed-in, tested non-compounding mechanism: a mechanism-level false friend behind a surface cosine match on "citation" and "selection" vocabulary. (observation-greenberg-alemohammad-citation-bias-and-dilution-cosine-084-pairing-is-false-friend)