Mining full‐text journal articles to assess obliteration by incorporation: H erbert A . S imon's concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing in economics, management, and psychology

This study explores the usefulness of full‐text retrieval in assessing obliteration by incorporation ( OBI ) by comparing patterns of OBI and citation substitution across economics, management, and psychology for two concept catch phrases—bounded rationality and satisficing. Searches using each term are conducted in JSTOR and in selected additional full‐text journal sources from over the years 1987–2011. Two measures of OBI are used, one simply tallying the presence or absence of references to Simon's oeuvre (strict OBI ) linked to the catch phrase and one counting only papers lacking any embedded reference as evidence of obliteration (lenient OBI ). By either measure, OBI existed but varied across subject area, time period, and catch phrase. Economics had the highest strict OBI (82%) and lenient OBI (43%) for bounded rationality and the highest strict OBI (64%) for satisficing; all 3 subject areas were essentially tied for lenient OBI at about 30%. Sixty‐two percent of the articles for bounded rationality—psychology were retrieved only because the catch phrase occurred in a title in the article bibliography. OBI research can benefit from full‐text searching; the main tradeoff is more detailed and nuanced evidence concerning OBI existence and trends versus increased noise in the retrieval.