Merton also introduced the less known counterpart to this concept, adumbrationism, meaning the attribution of insights, ideas or analogies absent from original works.
[4] It can also lead to ignoring or hiding the early sources of recent ideas under the claims of novelty and originality.
[2] Allan Chapman notes that 'obliteration by incorporation' often affects famous individuals, to whom attribution becomes considered as obvious and unnecessary, thus leading to their exclusion from citations, even if they and their ideas have been mentioned in the text.
[5] Marianne Ferber and Eugene Garfield concur with Chapman, noting that obliteration often occurs when the citation count and reputation of an affected scientist have already reached levels much higher than average.
[5] The obliteration phenomenon is a concept in library and information science, referring to the tendency for truly ground-breaking research papers to fail to be cited after the ideas they put forward are fully accepted into the orthodox world view.