AbstractThe infrastructure of contemporary academic publishing treats thepaper as the atomic unit of scientific knowledge. This is a categoryerror inherited from print culture: the paper is an administrativecontainer, not a knowledge unit, and citation systems, classificationschemes, author-year disambiguation protocols, and prestigehierarchies all inherit the broken atom. This paper proposes theideatom, the smallest independently meaningful scientific claim, asthe correct atomic unit of knowledge infrastructure, replacing thepaper-as-container that current citation systems have inheritedfrom print culture without examination. Around the ideatom, anastronomical taxonomy organises increasing levels of aggregation:ideon, idenet, Idesol, Idestem, Idestellation, Idelaxy, Ideverse, withassociated flora and fauna (review, replication, data, commentary)ecologically distinguished from structural components. The paperargues that citation lag is structurally equivalent to the light-coneproblem in physics, generates two empirically testable predictionsdistinguishable from existing citation velocity models, and showswhy the current infrastructure systematically misclassifiesinterdisciplinary work. The conceptual stack is offered as areplacement ontology for bibliometrics, scientometrics, and thephilosophy of science.
Storm Bjørn Flindt Temte (2026) studied this question.