Meta-Science

State legislatures copy each other, and measuring that means finding bills that share text and picking a cutoff. One CC0 corpus of state bills got its cutoff from a parenthetical example, and it stuck. Classifying all 2,968,117 pairs above it, 785,330 are page furniture rather than legislative text, and the most connected pair of states in the data is 99.9% two PDFs agreeing about their printer settings. That part is fixable. The second finding is not: two states implementing the same federal statute share text word for word without either copying the other, and no score can tell that apart from real diffusion.

This systematization paper traces the history of OCSR, comparing early rule-based systems like OSRA with modern deep learning approaches like DECIMER. It highlights the shift from image classification to image captioning and identifies critical gaps in dataset standardization and evaluation metrics.

Personal working taxonomy for categorizing papers as Method, Theory, Resource, Systematization, Position, Discovery, or Application contributions using a superposition model.