Citation is a mark-recapture net for drowned books

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)

South Asianists agree the extant corpus is a fraction of what was written, but the fraction has rarely been given a number with a method behind it. Ecology has the method: mark-recapture, where the overlap between two independent samples of a population estimates its total size. Surviving works and cited works are two such samples — every commentary, digest, and doxography captures titles, some extant and some not, and the extant fraction among cited works estimates overall survival. The structure of the record forces a further prediction: a work's probability of being extant must rise with the number of independent texts citing it, because citation and survival both draw on the same underlying circulation. If it holds, total pre-print Sanskrit production becomes a computable quantity with confidence intervals, genre by genre.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among works recorded in the Pandit database, the fraction extant will rise monotonically with the number of independent citing works identifiable in the SARIT corpus (once-cited < twice-cited < thrice-or-more), and the resulting capture-recapture estimate will put total production at no less than three times the extant catalogued titles. Primary clause: the monotone rise of extancy probability with independent citation count; the production multiplier is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Pandit database's work and mention records combined with citation extraction from the SARIT e-text corpus; extancy checked against the NGMPP/NGMCP and Cambridge Sanskrit Manuscripts Project catalogues.

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 in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Capture-recapture / unseen-species from citation overlap to estimate lost works, and the survival-rises-with-citation-count prediction, is an established method (Kestemont; complex-systems transmission models), un-run on the Pandit/SARIT South Asian citation graph specifically.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.