I'm writing about observations in some discipline -- in my case, law, but it could be anything else -- that are novel, nonobvious, and useful, and thus likely to be helpful to others, but that are pretty small and unambitious, to the point that many serious scholars wouldn't trouble themselves to write a scholarly article about them. The trouble is that because the observations don't get memorialized in media that future researchers will likely search (they might get blogged, but they won't be findable through LEXIS and WESTLAW), others will have to reinvent them. And, worst of all, the original inventor won't get that all-important extra citation to add to his citation count.
My tentative name for them is "micro-discoveries," in part because the piece in which I'm discussing this labels various facets of a scholar's life as "discovering," "disseminating," and "doing." But I'm not wild about the name, and if there's already an existing name -- perhaps from other disciplines -- I'd love to hear it. If you know such a name, please post it in the comments. Thanks!
(No help, but I observe that the English "discipline" has a journal, Notes &Queries, devoted to just the kind of thing you're talking about. Anyone know what's become of it in the Age of the Internets?)
This is not what you are looking for, but Philip Hamburger has a nice article in Notre Dame on "trivial rights." The Framers discussed trivial rights (eg, the right to wear a hat, the right to sleep on your left side), and had some interesting things to say on why they weren't specificantly mentioned otherwise.
Anyway, a vote against that bad word.
Or, put another way, the trend in software is to allow users to modify it considerably. So, for example, anyone can modify Firefox’s chrome. Is this shoddy? Only if it is done badly. For everyone else it can be a useful extension.
Now, a lot of legal discoveries may appear to be overdone legal fictions, that are clumsy and often evade any sort of review.
Oh, some people say “practice tips” but academics hate them, because they figure they can think their way around them.
The "original author" is not always bedrock, as he or she may be only contributing a serendipitious blend of ideas from personal memories/experiences.
But I suggest that EV has already done so, as the post itself -- by identifying this phenomenon and working to label it -- is itself such a "micro-discovery."
Another point: Just because a discovery or a concept is believed unimportant now does not mean it will not become so in the future. After all, Gregor Mendel's pioneering work on genetics and genetic traits was not recognized as such until long after his death, even though he was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and Pyotr Ufimtsev's mathematics paper that led to true stealth aircraft technology was published in an unclassified Soviet journal of mathematics because the Soviets percieved that it had no military application.
I do not know of such journals in law. But legal scholarly journals are different from those of other academic fields in many ways.
An example of a "small" discovery, from 1908, is the Hardy-Weinberg law of population genetics, published as a letter to the editor in Science. See this web version of the letter. The conjectured structure of DNA was published in 1953 by Watson and Crick on a single page in Nature.
A skilled scholar of today would presumably know how to turn a small discovery into a long paper if that were considered useful.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/nugget
I would borrow language from the open source context and call it a "legal patch," similar to a patch in Linux software. That is how I used it in this post. A recent example I wrote about of a "legal patch" or "micro-discovery" that I would never write about in a full article is my post on daylight saving time as an international custom that does not rise to the level of binding customary international law. Details here.
Roger Alford
Opinio Juris
You can find a fair number of old technical books called,
for example, "1001 Machine Shop Kinks" which are filled
with brief, useful, non-obvious ways of doing things.
"Hack" isn't bad in some circles, but as Steve P. demonstrates, noobs (defined as they who calls themselves programmers, but don't do assembler) bastardized that term from its original meaning (see the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy) and from there it was popularized it into a negative thing.
There was great interest in "knowledge management" among the mainstream consulting firms a while back - I'm sure they had taxonomies for this stuff.
With that foreword, I offer the following for consideration (could be hyphenated, I suppose):
"petit decouverte"
"petit idee"
"petit lumiere" (the little light)
Of course, "petit" has the advantage of being used in law already to mean minor or lesser. As used with "lumiere", it could mean little, as indicated above.
Neologism: We have demogogues (rabble-rousers), monologues (single speakers), prologues (before-speeches), etc. In the spirit of promoting concise and precise speech, I therefore propose a new word:
nanologue: a speech a tiny topic of narrow interest. (compound word from the Greek nanos (dwarf) and legein (to speak)). Example: "As the congressman droned on about the need to fund research into the Northeastern Nebraskan breeding habits of the Magruder's Wood Thrush to the tune of $10,000 per year, the viewers on C-Span were treated to a fine example of a nanologue."
Hack is no good, because it is an overused word with at least 3 meanings (n. an embarrassingly bad bit of work, whose badness one apologies for by labelling it a hack; v. to modify something in a technically challenging and sometimes obscure way; v. to break into a computer system without authorization, for either good or bad purposes). Many non-technical people think it always means breaking into computer systems for nefarious purposes,
and many computer people generate unnecessary bad PR for themselves by not realizing this.