# Literature verification notes

Canonical bibliography support for Series I / Paper 05.

Verification date: 2026-08-14.

1. Merton, R. K. (1988). The Matthew Effect in Science, II: Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property. Isis 79(4):606-623. DOI 10.1086/354848.
2. Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks. Science 286(5439):509-512. DOI 10.1126/science.286.5439.509.
3. Watts, D. J. (2002). A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks. PNAS 99(9):5766-5771. DOI 10.1073/pnas.082090499.
4. Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science 311(5762):854-856. DOI 10.1126/science.1121066.
5. Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B. M., Hövel, P., & Lehmann, S. (2019). Accelerating Dynamics of Collective Attention. Nature Communications 10:1759. DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w.
6. Barta, K., & Andalibi, N. (2024). Theorizing Self Visibility on Social Media: A Visibility Objects Lens. ACM TOCHI 31(3), Article 31. DOI 10.1145/3660337.
7. Houssard, A., Gargiulo, F., Venturini, T., Tubaro, P., et al. (2026). The Gerontocracy of Science: Attention Dynamics in the Age of Exponential Growth. npj Complexity 3:24. DOI 10.1038/s44260-026-00073-3.

Formal boundary notes:
- The Persistent Contact Theorem is proved directly in this paper by a conditional-hazard product bound and does not depend on independence.
- The finite-sum counterexample is stated under an independence model.
- The Prominence Pressure Conjecture is not claimed as an established theorem of social diffusion.
- Existing cumulative-advantage, preferential-attachment, attention-competition and cascade literature provides adjacent mechanisms and counterweights, not a direct proof of the conjecture.
- The effective information mass, channel entropy, prominence-hazard formulation, and PPSS-PPC cohort are proposed constructs.