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Sleeping beauties in meme diffusion

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  • Leihan Zhang

    (Beihang University)

  • Ke Xu

    (Beihang University)

  • Jichang Zhao

    (Beihang University)

Abstract

A sleeping beauty in diffusion indicates that certain information, whether an idea or innovation, will experience a hibernation period before it undergoes a sudden spike of popularity, and this pattern is found widely in the citation history of scientific publications. However, in this study, we demonstrate that the sleeping beauty is an interesting and unexceptional phenomenon in information diffusion; more inspiring is that there exists two consecutive sleeping beauties in the entire lifetime of a meme’s propagation, which suggests that the information, including scientific topics, search queries or Wikipedia entries, which we call memes, will go unnoticed for a period and suddenly attract some attention, and then it falls asleep again and later wakes up with another unexpected popularity peak. Further exploration of this phenomenon shows that the intervals between two wake-ups follow an exponential distributions, both the rising and falling stage lengths, follow power law distributions, and the second wake-up tends to reach its peak in a shorter period of time. In addition, the total volumes of the two wake-ups have positive correlations. Taking these findings into consideration, an upgraded Bass model is presented to well describe the diffusion dynamics of memes on different media. Our results can help understand the common mechanism behind the propagation of different memes and are instructive towards locating the tipping point in marketing or in finding innovative publications in science.

Suggested Citation

  • Leihan Zhang & Ke Xu & Jichang Zhao, 2017. "Sleeping beauties in meme diffusion," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 383-402, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:112:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2390-2
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2390-2
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Cui, Hao & Kertész, János, 2023. "“Born in Rome” or “Sleeping Beauty”: Emergence of hashtag popularity on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 619(C).
    3. Houcemeddine Turki & Mohamed Ali Hadj Taieb & Mohamed Ben Aouicha & Ajith Abraham, 2020. "Nature or Science: what Google Trends says," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1367-1385, August.
    4. Hou, Jianhua & Yang, Xiucai, 2020. "Social media-based sleeping beauties: Defining, identifying and features," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    5. Jianhua Hou & Xiucai Yang, 2019. "Patent sleeping beauties: evolutionary trajectories and identification methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 187-215, July.

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