Skip to main content
Log in

To be the Prince to wake up Sleeping Beauty: the rediscovery of the delayed recognition studies

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In science, sleeping papers, previously known as “Sleeping Beauties”, refer to scientific papers that are recognized by the scientific community after a long hibernation period following their publication. Many factors may contribute to their delayed yet exceptional popularity, such as the introduction of new technologies or ideas that are beyond the capabilities at the time of publication. The recognition of a sleeping paper, often through a paper that cites the sleeping paper and has a profound impact on the research area, is important to the scientific community. Here, we proposed a method to identify the paper that rediscovers a sleeping paper, known as a rediscovering paper, based on the citation network of the sleeping paper. Based on the 15 rediscovering papers obtained from the top sleeping papers in science, we introduced 5 feature indices of the leading authors of these rediscovering papers (rediscovering authors) defined by an academic search system AMiner (https://cn.aminer.org/). The 5 feature indices depict academic achievements of researchers from various aspects: Publication, Citation, Longevity, H-index and Sociability. The rediscovering authors lead to most general scientific authors in the 5 feature indices. Our results reveal common features of potential rediscovering authors in the scientific community who may play significant roles in the propagation of citation networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://apps.webofknowledge.com.

  2. https://www.scholar.google.com.

  3. https://cn.aminer.org.

  4. Here, we note that the recognized time is different from that defined in Ke et al. (2015). According to the definition in Ke et al. (2015), the recognized time of the sleeping paper No. 14 was 1994; however, the first citation was at 1996 according to WoS. Hence, the definition in Ke et al. (2015) is not applicable to our data source.

  5. https://cn.aminer.org/ranks/ranks-res-help.

  6. https://cn.aminer.org/aminernetwork.

References

  • Barber, B. (1961). Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery. Science, 134(3479), 596–602.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Braun, T., Glänzel, W., & Schubert, A. (2010). On sleeping beauties, princes and other tales of citation distributions. Research Evaluation, 19(3), 195–202.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burrell, Q. L. (2005). Are “Sleeping Beauties” to be expected? Scientometrics, 65(3), 381–389.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cole, S. (1970). Professional standing and the reception of scientific discoveries. American Journal of Sociology, 76(2), 286–306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & van Raan, A. F. (2010). Is scientific literature subject to a ‘sell-by-date’? A general methodology to analyze the ‘durability’of scientific documents. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 329–339.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P., & Papanek, G. F. (1984). Faculty ratings of major economics departments by citations. The American Economic Review, 74(1), 225–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1955). Citation indexes for science. Science, 122(3159), 108–111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1980). Premature discovery or delayed recognition-why. Current Contents, 21, 5–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1989). Delayed recognition in scientific discovery-citation frequency-analysis aids the search for case-histories. Current Contents, 23, 3–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1989). More delayed recognition. 1. Examples from the genetics of color-blindness, the entropy of short-term-memory, phosphoinositides, and polymer rheology. Current Contents, 38, 3–8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1990). More delayed recognition. 2. From inhibin to scanning electron-microscopy. Current Contents, 9, 3–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillespie, D. T. (1977). Exact stochastic simulation of coupled chemical reactions. The Journal of Physical Chemistry, 81(25), 2340–2361.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Glänzel, W., Schlemmer, B., & Thijs, B. (2003). Better late than never? On the chance to become highly cited only beyond the standard bibliometric time horizon. Scientometrics, 58(3), 571–586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. In Proceedings of the National academy of sciences of the United States of America (pp. 16,569–16,572).

  • Ke, Q., Ferrara, E., Radicchi, F., & Flammini, A. (2015). Defining and identifying sleeping beauties in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(24), 7426–7431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kinney, A. (2007). National scientific facilities and their science impact on nonbiomedical research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(46), 17943–17947.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, J. (2014). Citation curves of “all-elements-sleeping-beauties” : “Flash in the pan” first and then “delayed recognition”. Scientometrics, 100(2), 595–601.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, J., & Fred, Y. Y. (2016). Distinguishing sleeping beauties in science. Scientometrics, 108(2), 821–828.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Newman, M. E. (2004). Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(suppl 1), 5200–5205.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ohba, N., & Nakao, K. (2012). Sleeping beauties in ophthalmology. Scientometrics, 93(2), 253–264.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Radicchi, F., Fortunato, S., & Castellano, C. (2008). Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(45), 17268–17272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stent, G. S. (1972). Prematurity and uniqueness in scientific discovery. Scientific American, 227, 84–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sugimoto, C. R., & Mostafa, J. (2018). A note of concern and context: On careful use of terminologies. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 69(3), 347–348.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sun, J., Min, C., & Li, J. (2016). A vector for measuring obsolescence of scientific articles. Scientometrics, 107(2), 745–757.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sun, X., Kaur, J., Milojević, S., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2013). Social dynamics of science. In Scientific reports (Vol. 3).

  • Tang, J., Zhang, J., Yao, L., Li, J., Zhang, L., & Su, Z. (2008). Arnetminer: Extraction and mining of academic social networks. In KDD’08 (pp. 990–998).

  • Uzzi, B., Mukherjee, S., Stringer, M., & Jones, B. (2013). Atypical combinations and scientific impact. Science, 342(6157), 468–472.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Dalen, H. P., & Henkens, K. (2005). Signals in science-on the importance of signaling in gaining attention in science. Scientometrics, 64(2), 209–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Raan, A. F. (2004). Sleeping beauties in science. Scientometrics, 59(3), 467–472.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Raan, A. F. (2015). Dormitory of physical and engineering sciences: Sleeping Beauties may be sleeping innovations. PLoS ONE, 10(10), e0139786.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, D., Song, C., & Barabási, A. L. (2013). Quantifying long-term scientific impact. Science, 342(6154), 127–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wyatt, H. (1975). Knowledge and prematurity: The journey from transformation to dna. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 18(2), 149–156.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91430101).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jinzhi Lei.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 6 and 7.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Citation histories of SPs in Table 1. Red dashed lines are the recognized time according to Definition  1. (Color figure online)

Fig. 7
figure 7

Co-citation numbers and spontaneities of all papers citing the SP directly. Papers are sorted in descending order of the spontaneity. Red bars represent for papers published no later than the recognized time, and green bars represent the other papers. The red pentagram indicates the RP found by the method proposed in this study. (Color figure online)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Song, Y., Situ, F., Zhu, H. et al. To be the Prince to wake up Sleeping Beauty: the rediscovery of the delayed recognition studies. Scientometrics 117, 9–24 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2830-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2830-7

Keywords

Navigation