Credibility Laundering as a Vector: Change-Point Detection and Infrastructural Afterlives of Reactionary Knowledge

This preregistration specifies a preregistered scientometric audit of Population and Environment (1978–2024) to test whether journal content, authorship, and citation structures exhibit discontinuities aligned with three governance shocks: (1) the 1988 editorial transition into Virginia Abernethy, (2) the 1999 transition to Kevin MacDonald, and (3) the post-2004 reconstitution associated with Springer’s acquisition (operationalized as 2005). The study operationalizes “credibility laundering” as the conversion of a venue’s accumulated legitimacy into downstream credibility for frames and claims that would otherwise be treated as ideologically motivated or methodologically suspect, and evaluates both (a) within-period regime shifts and (b) post-regime citation afterlives and algorithmic discoverability.