A footnote looks like decoration on the page — small type, easy to skip — but pull the reference it points to and, in a surprising number of cases, part of the argument above it stops standing. Citations are not merely courtesy toward prior authors; they are load-bearing dependencies, in the structural-engineering sense, and a claim that leans on a citation it has not actually verified is leaning on a wall that may not be there. Scholarly communication treats citation counts as a measure of impact when it should also treat them as a map of structural risk: which claims, across a field, depend on the same handful of sources that turn out, on inspection, to have been thinly evidenced from the start. CitationalCommitment names the obligation this dependency creates — that citing something is not a neutral gesture but a commitment to the weight the citation is being asked to bear, a commitment too rarely honoured with actual verification.
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