They justified their point by saying the research was "emergent". My point is that almost all pre-modern research was "emergent" by their usage, and a large amount of contemporaneous research is "emergent" as well.

That would be slightly annoying, but they did this to then justify points about how the resulting model is "emergent". The research process, and the resulting output, can and (my main point) almost always do, differ as to whether they are truly emergent.