The need for an evolution of credit attribution in modern scientific publishing

<ns5:p>Modern scientific publishing struggles to give proper credit to the true originators of ideas. Plagiarism, deliberate or inadvertent, undermines academic integrity, while systemic pressures such as “publish or perish,” paper mills, guest authorship, and language barriers distort how credit is assigned. Even without blantant misconduct, citation practices favor reviews and high-profile journals, obscuring foundational work. Over time, original contributions are often forgotten, misattributed, lost or overshadowed. Conversely secondary sources accumulate recognition and are far more likely to be cited. To address this, we propose an “L-index” (Legacy index) that traces chains of influence by assigning secondary and tertiary citations (and so forth) to earlier works cited indirectly. By leveraging existing citation data, this metric would highlight the long-term impact of individual articles, re-establish broken attribution chains, and reveal how ideas evolve, diverge, or fade over time. Although vulnerable to manipulation and error propagation, an L-index, especially if adjusted to exclude self-citation, would complement existing bibliometric measures by valuing enduring scholarly contributions rather than immediate popularity. Such an approach would better reflect the collaborative nature of science, ensuring that those upon whose shoulders modern research stands continue to receive recognition for their foundational work.</ns5:p>