The citation is the advertisement

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The standard picture has copying demand driving citation: popular books get quoted. This conjecture reverses the arrow for the university period, joining modern bibliometrics' lead-lag analysis to medieval manuscript counts: a work newly promoted in a dominant master's citations generated rental and copying demand afterward, because students copied what disputation had just made necessary, so the master's citation practice functioned as the syllabus nobody wrote. Stationers and students alike read the argument culture as a market signal. If this holds, citation profiles should predict manuscript diffusion with a decades-scale lag rather than merely reflect it, and the causal direction of the medieval book trade's bestseller lists inverts for the schools' core stock.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): for works whose citation in the Aquinas citation corpus begins or jumps in a datable composition period, FAMA's dated attestations show a diffusion increase in the following decades that significantly exceeds the increase for citation-flat control works matched on genre and prior diffusion; the verdict follows this lead-lag contrast. Statistical test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus chronology, cross-referenced with FAMA (Œuvres latines médiévales à succès) dated diffusion data.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was supplied inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The direction is the standard account of the university book trade: Rouse & Rouse and the pecia literature document that masters' teaching and disputation generated the copying and rental demand the stationers served, and the Summa's own success generating derivative copying is documented; lead-lag analysis is a standard bibliometric method. The FAMA-based lagged contrast is un-run, but the causal direction is anticipated.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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