Citations can be used as the metadata. One of the closest corresponding things in cliometrics are ‘sleeping beauty’ papers, which instead of the usual gradual decline in citation rate, suddenly see a big uptick many years afterwards. The recent ‘big teams vs small teams’ paper discussed sleeping beauty papers a little: https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/bias/2019-wu.pdf You could also take multiple discovery as quantifying repetition, since one of the most common ways for a multiple to happen is for it to happen in a different field where it is also important/useful but they haven’t heard of the original discovery in the first field.
Citations can be used as the metadata. One of the closest corresponding things in cliometrics are ‘sleeping beauty’ papers, which instead of the usual gradual decline in citation rate, suddenly see a big uptick many years afterwards. The recent ‘big teams vs small teams’ paper discussed sleeping beauty papers a little: https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/bias/2019-wu.pdf You could also take multiple discovery as quantifying repetition, since one of the most common ways for a multiple to happen is for it to happen in a different field where it is also important/useful but they haven’t heard of the original discovery in the first field.
There’s a nice version of this with Ed Boyden on how old papers helped lead to the hot new ‘expansion microscopy’ thing (funded, incidentally, by OpenPhil): https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-ed-boyden-neuroscience-3907eccbd4ca