Reviewing eight thinkers’ research records
This review examined the scope of eight thinkers’ contributions, shared attribution and risks of double counting, alongside existing records in science, mathematics, politics, education and the arts. It produced no new scores and did not establish that scoring is fully fair across fields.
What the review covered
The baseline comprised 200 people, 1,094 personal ledger entries and 1,015 distinct outcomes. Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Mencius have published research records; Zhuangzi, Laozi and Han Feizi remain off-list research subjects. The five published records contain 19 personal views of 18 distinct outcomes. Views are not additional outcomes, and listed entries do not amount to an exhaustive life record.
Conclusions and limits for each thinker
- Confucius
Ritual and virtue ethics remain distinct from teaching practices. Primary texts support distinguishing the outputs, but do not establish the net educational effect or precise personal share. The same effect cannot be credited in both outcomes.
Open current research record →- Socrates
The framework for testing reasons shared with Plato uses one outcome and one attribution budget. Historical practice and the dialogue author’s additions have not yet been separated dialogue by dialogue.
Open current research record →- Plato
The forms-and-knowledge outcome and the late-dialectic outcome still share a method of classification. Specific new arguments may be distinct, but book titles do not establish mutual exclusivity or justify merging entire outcomes.
Open current research record →- Aristotle
Limited primary-text mappings distinguish the four-cause framework from the analysis of natural change. Other boundaries, including logic versus rhetoric and ethics versus politics, still require pairwise checks. Nine entries do not mean nine fully deduplicated outcomes.
Open current research record →- Mencius
Moral psychology and proposals for governance provisionally remain separate objects. Shared ethical premises cannot be counted twice; textual formation and overlapping propositions remain unresolved.
Open current research record →- Zhuangzi
The composite record retains epistemic, evaluative and expressive functions for investigation. A connected system need not be one outcome, while different parables need not be distinct increments. The subject remains outside the current research rankings.
- Laozi
The link between the textual framework and an identifiable historical individual remains unresolved. Conditional attribution is neither an identity probability nor an established individual score. The subject remains outside the current research rankings.
- Han Feizi
Law, administrative techniques, positional authority and bureaucratic verification must be considered together with coercive costs. Authorship, transformations of predecessors’ ideas and net effects remain unresolved. The subject remains outside the current research rankings.
What comparisons across fields revealed
A shared method cannot be counted again for every book, paper or application. Nor should a specific new problem and solution be discarded merely because they rely on common foundations. This rule applies to thought and science alike.
The current records place some composite philosophical outcomes alongside dozens of scientific entries. Entry counts, magnitude and attribution all vary. Differences in total scores alone do not establish bias; the absence of occupational weights does not establish substantive fairness either.
A work’s capacity to be learned from, a teaching method and an actual teaching service must be distinguished rather than credited repeatedly for the same effect. Later students’, performers’ and researchers’ independent additions should not all be attributed back to a founder.
Potential role asymmetries in arts attribution remain to be checked: some score-based musical works explicitly exclude mere copying or dissemination, while some dramatic and literary records still combine creation, performance and publishing roles. Specific actions need to be identified; remaining shares should not automatically be returned to the author.
Insufficient reading is not evidence for reducing both an outcome’s magnitude and a person’s share. Unresolved responsibility is not established credit to others, and uncovered contributions are not treated as zero.
Why four additional subjects remain deferred
- Mozi
Reliable passages supporting ethical and political claims, early and later textual layers, and individual formative actions are still needed. A school’s name cannot substitute for personal attribution.
- Wang Yangming
Reliable passages from Instructions for Practical Living and Inquiry on the Great Learning, and the boundaries of recording and compilation, are still needed. Educational, administrative and military practice require separate cases.
- Immanuel Kant
Primary texts already distinguish epistemic, ethical and aesthetic objects, but their individual magnitudes, antecedents and formation budgets remain unresolved. One aggregate estimate cannot simply be copied three times.
- Ibn Sina
Further evidence is needed on increments over predecessors in logic and psychology, overlap with metaphysics, and the Canon of Medicine’s knowledge organization, net effects and formative responsibility.
Unchanged scores, unfinished research
This review added no personal scores and changed no existing attribution budgets. Deferral for these four subjects means neither zero nor low contribution. An entire life need not be exhaustively documented before a well-bounded outcome can be examined. Next comes pairwise identification of shared foundations and independent increments, followed by consistent budget revisions and recalculation where warranted. Research estimates remain open to challenge; evidence certification is a separate threshold.
Records and evidence
Person links lead to research records that may continue to change; this article records the scope of the review on 17 September 2026. The primary texts and scholarly entries below help locate objects and disputes. They do not directly supply magnitude estimates or attribution percentages.