The Journal Impact Factor (IF) — a 2-year citation velocity metric designed in 1955 for library collection management — has become the dominant instrument for evaluating scientific output, allocating research funding, and determining academic careers. This repurposing is structurally unsound: the IF measures citation frequency within a journal-bounded prestige economy, not epistemic quality, reproducibility, or real-world consequence. Every proposed alternative (h-index, CiteScore, altmetrics, Scite Index) addresses surface parameters while preserving the broken ontology: the paper as the atomic unit of science, citations as the signal, and journals as the prestige layer. We propose Apodokimos — a decentralized Epistemic Contribution Graph (ECG) protocol that replaces journal-level citation counting with claim-level survival scoring. In the ECG model, the atomic unit is a falsifiable claim, not a paper. Claims accumulate epistemic weight through a function of replication score, dependency depth, survival under falsification, and real-world outcome linkage. Attestations — typed as supports, contradicts, replicates, or refutes — are registered immutably on a Substrate parachain. Claim content is stored permanently on Arweave. Researcher reputation is encoded as non-transferable Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), making governance weight identity-bound rather than capital-bound. The protocol is owned by no institution and licensed under AGPL-3.0, structurally preventing commercial capture. The first deployment domain is clinical medicine, where PICO-structured claim schemas and existing trial registry infrastructure provide well-defined granularity and objective real-world outcome oracles.
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