The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Defining and identifying Sleeping Beauties in science
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Citations
Cites
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“[56] Garfield E (1972) Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation.”
MethodWhy the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research
Seglen, P. O. (1997) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.314.7079.497 · Cited by 2,447
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Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact
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Cited by
Fortunato, S., Bergstrom, C. T., Börner, K., Evans, J. A., Helbing, D., Milojević, S., Petersen, A. M., Radicchi, F., Sinatra, R., Uzzi, B., et al. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aao0185 · Cited by 1,497
“Only a tiny fraction of papers deviate from the pattern described by such a model—some of which are called “sleeping beauties,” because they receive very little notice for decades after publication and then suddenly receive a burst of attention and citations (80, 81).”
Self-citationHutchins, B. I., Yuan, X., Anderson, J. M., & Santangelo, G. M. (2016) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541 · Cited by 500
Xia, F., Wang, W., Bekele, T. M., & Liu, H. (2017) · IEEE Transactions on Big Data · doi:10.1109/tbdata.2016.2641460 · Cited by 266
Bornmann, L. (2017) · Higher Education · doi:10.1007/s10734-016-9995-x · Cited by 117
The memory of science: Inflation, myopia, and the knowledge network
Pan, R. K., Petersen, A. M., Pammolli, F., & Fortunato, S. (2018) · Journal of Informetrics · doi:10.1016/j.joi.2018.06.005 · Cited by 79
Metadata
- Authors
- Ke, Q., Ferrara, E., Radicchi, F., & Flammini, A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2015-05-26
- Volume
- 112
- Issue
- 24
- Pages
- 7426-7431
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2171817276
- Cited by
- 416
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 43.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Ke, Q., Ferrara, E., Radicchi, F., & Flammini, A. (2015). Defining and identifying Sleeping Beauties in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1424329112
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
