The statement that force is fundamentally defined as the rate of change of momentum is a foundational definition in classical mechanics (Newton's second law), serving as a basic physical premise rather than a contestable empirical hypothesis requiring individual citation.
The claim is a standard definition from classical physics. None of the retrieved papers directly test or dispute this definition; instead, papers like [0] explore extensions or delay formulations of Newtonian mechanics while taking the underlying framework as given. Therefore, this is common knowledge within physics and does not require empirical paper support.