Defining and identifying Sleeping Beauties in science

By Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi, Alessandro Flammini. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015

404 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Scientific papers typically have a finite lifetime: their rate to attract citations achieves its maximum a few years after publication, and then steadily declines. Previous studies pointed out the existence of a few blatant exceptions: papers whose relevance has not been recognized for decades, but then suddenly become highly influential and cited. The Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen “paradox” paper is an exemplar Sleeping Beauty. We study how common Sleeping Beauties are in science. We introduce a quantity that captures both the recognition intensity and the duration of the “sleeping” period, and show that Sleeping Beauties are far from exceptional. The distribution of such quantity is continuous and has power-law behavior, suggesting a common mechanism behind delayed but intense recognition at all scales. A Sleeping Beauty (SB) in science refers to a paper whose importance is not recognized for several years after publication. Its citation history exhibits a long hibernation period followed by a sudden spike of popularity. Previous studies suggest a relative scarcity of SBs. The reliability of this conclusion is, however, heavily dependent on identification methods based on arbitrary threshold parameters for sleeping time and number of citations, applied to small or monodisciplinary bibliographic datasets. Here we present a systematic, large-scale, and multidisciplinary analysis of the SB phenomenon in science. We introduce a parameter-free measure that quantifies the extent to which a specific paper can be considered an SB. We apply our method to 22 million scientific papers published in all disciplines of natural and social sciences over a time span longer than a century. Our results reveal that the SB phenomenon is not exceptional. There is a continuous spectrum of delayed recognition where both the hibernation period and the awakening intensity are taken into account. Although many cases of SBs can be identified by looking at monodisciplinary bibliographic data, the SB phenomenon becomes much more apparent with the analysis of multidisciplinary datasets, where we can observe many examples of papers achieving delayed yet exceptional importance in disciplines different from those where they were originally published. Our analysis emphasizes a complex feature of citation dynamics that so far has received little attention, and also provides empirical evidence against the use of short-term citation metrics in the quantification of scientific impact.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c34100e8284c6bdf053155d0d346fb756c761355

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Citations in the corpus

The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, methodology): “Though not precisely discussed in the paper, the landmark works might be one of the reasons that ‘‘sleeping beauties’’ in science are ‘‘woken up’’ [129].”
Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level (2015, background): “In other words, if an article becomes more or less influential compared to its peers after that fixed window has passed, as for example can occur with “sleeping beauties” [42], this would not be apparent to users of SNCS2.”
Digital soil mapping: A brief history and some lessons (2016, background): “Sleeping beauty in scientific publication refers to a publication whose importance goes unnoticed for a long time and then suddenly attracts a lot of attention or citations (Van Raan, 2004; Ke et al., 2015).”