{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0526927547462224, 'fraction_numerical': 0.03874467260751647, 'mean_word_length': 5.0327102803738315, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“Matthew Effect” in Neurosciences

Some years ago, we devoted a column to possessive/nonpossessive eponyms in neuroscience (Haines & Olry, 2003). The world of eponyms, of course, provides an inexhaustible supply of linguistic material for historians to scrutinize (Anonymous, 1986; Cooper, 1983; Burchell, 1985; Endtz, 1989; Dervaud, 1990; Olry, 1995). Let’s give two typical examples. Firstly, Ganser’s commissure, described in 1882 by Dresden neuropsychiatrist Sigbert Joseph Maria Ganser (1882). This commissure actually was discovered by Franz Schnopfhagen five years earlier (Schnopfhagen, 1877), and “par suite d’une confusion regrettable” (“by an unfortunate mistake”; Dejerine, 1901) L. O. Darkschewitsch and G. I. Pribytkov called it Forel’s commissure in 1891. Secondly, Bronislaw Onuf-Onufrowicz (1899) coined the term “Nucleus X” to refer to a parasympathetic subpopulation of sacral spinal cord neurons at the very end of the nineteenth century. His name was kept in anatomical literature but only in the form of “Onuf’s nucleus X” (Paturet, 1964). In the present column, we would like to explore another facet of eponyms: their involvement in the so-called “Matthew effect.” Robert King Merton (1910–2003), an American sociologist and Giddings Professor at Columbia University, coined the term “Matthew effect” to refer to the act of a priori ascribing an important scientific discovery to the head of the laboratory, even when the real discoverer had been one of his/her students (Merton, 1973; for review, see Rigney, 2010). In other words, history is more inclined to memorize the names of generals than those of lesser soldiers. The Matthew effect has its roots in the Gospel of Matthew, probably written in Syria in the late first century AD: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away” (Matthew 25:29; American Standard Version). One of the most famous examples of the Matthew effect, and one that became a media event, occurred in 1974, when British radio astronomer Anthony Hewish (b. 1924) won the Nobel Prize for Physics (together with Martin Ryle) for the discovery of pulsars. In reality, the first person to notice the stellar radio source was not him but his student Jocelyn Bell (b. 1943) (Wade, 1975; Broad & Wade, 1987; Greenstein, 1987). What about the Matthew effect in neurosciences? Let us look at two well-known eponyms (Gasser’s ganglion and Lasègue’s sign) and two less classical ones (Schacher’s ganglion and Davidoff-Schechter’s artery).