Comment by einpoklum

> This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas. > > Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

And your search includes papers mentioning the various ideas you heard about from those other people. They almost always publish _something_ about it, and in the rare cases they do not, you put them in the "thanks" section, describing which ideas they contributed to (or in very rare cases, cite an unpublished result/claim as "personal communication" from an author).

I was in academic for a number of years (Theoretical Comp Sci, then DB management systems architecture), and what I just described seems to have been the practice. It is of course possible that people neglected to cite the sources of some of their ideas, but not that I know of. The worst I could say is that several authors' work exhibited a similar approach and a person preferred to cite one of them rather than another.