Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theoretic models of credit seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities—which reference class—credit determinations should be indexed for an act under some state of nature. Solving this problem requires developing rich, mutually informed theories of community and credit that are sensitive to the structure and status systems of complex, heterogeneous scholarly networks.