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Altmetrics-based sleeping beauties: necessity or just a supplement?

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Abstract

With the rapid growth of social media, knowledge diffusion of scientific literature comprises not only citation trajectory but also dimension of societal impact. For special types of knowledge diffusion, especially Sleeping Beauties in Science (SBs), it is essential but not adequate to only use citation analysis to measure its trajectory. The impact and value of scientific literature can be fully revealed only by integrating the diffusion trajectory of citation and social media. This study focuses on identifying the possible problems in research on SBs and emphasizes the necessity of Altmetrics-based SB (A-SB) to solve them. Referring to the practice in our earlier study, we identified 7 A-SBs and 11 citation-based SBs (C-SB). The comparative analysis of interdisciplinary and impact between A-SB and C-SB revealed the likely defects in the traditional C-SB research on the measurement of impact in knowledge diffusion, the mining of potential mechanism, the explanation of scientific knowledge diffusion pathways and the discovery of some key scientific literature, and that A-SB plays a vital role in these aspects. In contrast to C-SB, A-SB also offers the possibility to explore pathways for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, a typical A-SB case analysis suggested that A-SB has a unique advantage in discovering some innovative research with potential value ahead.

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  1. https://leydesdorff.github.io/diversity_measurement/

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China(Grant No. 20BTQ085), and The Soft Science Project of Science and Technology Program of Guangdong Province(CN), 2019B101001024.

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  1. Jianhua Hou and Hao Li have contributed equally to the work.

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  1. School of Information Management, Sun Yat-Sen University, No.132, Waihuan East Road, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, Panyu District, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Jianhua Hou, Hao Li & Yang Zhang

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Hou, J., Li, H. & Zhang, Y. Altmetrics-based sleeping beauties: necessity or just a supplement?. Scientometrics 128, 5477–5506 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04798-z

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