Coin Collecting a "distributed, non-academic scientific discipline"

Mr Welsh in an "I am a better numismatist than somebody who works in a University" reply claims he has been "contributing to the core literature of that distributed, nonacademic scientific discipline". Not so long ago the US coineys were calling their heap-of-decontextualised-coins-on-a-table-numismatics an academic discipline, but were unable to point to any textbooks containing an exposition of its methodology as such. Glad then we've got that sorted out.