Samuel Bostaph wrote:  "Back when I bothered to read the AER, I did get 
tired of articles that began with an assertion that the article was 
intended to be "seminal," when what was being presented owed more to 
Onan than to George Borts"

Economists are not known for their modesty.  Nonetheless, a quick search 
on JSTOR, looking at the 20 most recent articles in the AER to use the 
word "seminal" and, because I don't know when Samuel Bostaph stopped 
reading the AER, another 10 from 1996, finds not a single one in which 
an author declares that he or she intends his or her own article to be 
seminal.  In 100 percent of the cases examined, it is a reference to the 
work of others.  And among the cases where I personally knew the papers 
cited -- sometimes they were far from my own interests, so it is hard to 
judge -- the papers were genuinely ones that had been the font of 
substantial further work, suggesting that the cited papers were 
appropriately described as fruitful ancestors and were not masturbatory 
dead ends.

Kevin Hoover