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!