M.V. Simkin, V.P. Roychowdhury
Scientists often re-invent things which were long known. Here we review these activities as related to the mechanism of producing power law distributions, originally proposed in 1922 by Yule to explain experimental data on the sizes of biological genera, collected by Willis. We estimate that scientists are busy re-discovering America about 2/3 of time.
C. Schmitz, A. Hotho, R. Jäschke, and G. Stumme. Proceedings of the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, volume 4011 of LNCS, page 530-544. Budva, Montenegro, Springer, (June 2006)