Citation Analysis
Citation analysis, which involves examining an item's referring documents, is used in searching for materials and analyzing their merit. Since citation analysis does not look at a document's contents, only references to it, it can be applied to a documents such as Dynamics or Treatise that do not in fact exist.
Dynamics is referenced in the professional scientific literature and in textbooks.
The list in the previous section shows 42 references to Dynamics and 27 to Treatise, which are a lower limit, since the list is not up to date. An online search, as of 2005, for these titles with author Moriarty, reveals 263 references to Dynamics and 209 to Treatise. These are excellent numbers for any scientific paper, where the overall average is about 6 references. They are even better when compared to other papers from the same era - by 1900, the Royal Society's Catalog of Scientific Papers already listed 800,000 papers from 3000 journals. Most of these have been forgotten, and only a few are still referenced today, as shown by analyses of references to old scientific articles. The Dynamics of An Asteroid is among the select group of Victorian scientific works that are still remembered and referenced even today, despite (or perhaps because of) its nonexistence.
Read more about this topic: The Dynamics Of An Asteroid