Scope and limits

This is a null about INDEXED citations, not about the state of the field. Conference proceedings are indexed unevenly, and two of these anchors are conference papers, one of which has never been assigned a DOI, so absence from an index is weaker evidence than it would be for a journal article. It does NOT establish that no researcher has read or acted on the argument, only that no indexed work cites it. The Semantic Scholar cross-check on the 2020 anchor failed with HTTP 429 and was not retried, so that row rests on OpenAlex alone. Counts are as at 2026-09-04 and will change. THE QUERY URLS BEHIND THIS NULL ARE NOT RECOVERABLE, recorded 2026-09-06. METHOD's own rule is that "Searched OpenAlex and found nothing" is not a recordable null - the URL is. The file holding those URLs no longer exists, so this null cannot be reproduced from the record as it stands, and re-running the search would be a NEW search on a moved index rather than a reproduction of this one. The finding is not withdrawn: it was verified against content by VER-1005 and the substantive claim stands. What is lost is the ability to check the SEARCH rather than the conclusion, which is exactly the thing the rule exists to protect.