Ševcenko's law
Encyclopedia
Ševčenko's law or Ševčenko's law of the dog and the forest is a way of describing the tendency of historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

s to repeat the coverage and the work of previous historians, to the disadvantage of general historical coverage. It was enunciated by the Polish-Ukrainian historian, Ihor Ševčenko
Ihor Ševcenko
Ihor Ševčenko was a Polish-born philologist and historian of Ukrainian origin. He died 26 December 2009 in Cambridge, MA. A memorial website, where remembrances can be posted, has been established at https://sites.google.com/site/ihorsevcenko/home...

.

The situation is compared to a dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...

 and a forest
Forest
A forest, also referred to as a wood or the woods, is an area with a high density of trees. As with cities, depending where you are in the world, what is considered a forest may vary significantly in size and have various classification according to how and what of the forest is composed...

. A dog going into a virgin forest picks a tree at random, and urinates against it. Despite the tree having no intrinsic outstanding attraction as an object for urinating against, other dogs subsequently entering the same forest will show a tendency to urinate against the same tree.
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