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Sleeping beauties in health informatics research

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Abstract

Scientific publications are received by the research community in various ways. Some articles are quickly cited, while others are discovered only after a longer period of time. The term ‘sleeping beauty’ is used to describe a publication that went unnoticed (asleep) for an extended period of time and then, almost suddenly, became interesting regarding the number of citations. Using our software based on van Raan criteria, we surprisingly identified only one Sleeping beauty according to van Rann criteria and two “to be” sleeping beauties among almost 71,000 Health informatics publications. Based on the rarity of sleeping beauties encountered in our study, we might hypothesise that knowledge development and its publications based archiving in young and extremely fast developing scientific fields like Health informatics might differ from traditional scientific disciplines, especially regarding the life cycles of innovations.

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The study was partially funded by Horizon 2020 Project Stamina with the Grant Number 883441.

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Correspondence to Peter Kokol.

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Kokol, P., Blažun Vošner, H., Završnik, J. et al. Sleeping beauties in health informatics research. Scientometrics 127, 5073–5081 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04454-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04454-y

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