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Are “Sleeping Beauties” to be expected?

Author

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  • Quentin L. Burrell

    (Isle of Man International Business School)

Abstract

Summary A paper that is little cited ('sleeps') for a long period of time and then becomes much cited ('is awakened'), has been termed by van Raan (2004) a 'Sleeping Beauty', or a paper that was 'ahead of its time'. The inference is that the importance of the paper was not initially recognised, only later was it (re)discovered. On the other hand, much theoretical work in informetrics views the citation process as being purely random - modelled by an appropriate stochastic process. From this point of view, the 'awakening' could simply be a matter of chance without necessarily saying anything about the worth of the paper. The question therefore arises as to whether such awakenings can be explained or expected purely by the random nature of the model or whether they are so unlikely that an alternative explanation should be sought. In this note we express the notion of a Sleeping Beauty in terms of a well-known stochastic model and seek to answer this question, at least in general terms.

Suggested Citation

  • Quentin L. Burrell, 2005. "Are “Sleeping Beauties” to be expected?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 65(3), pages 381-389, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:65:y:2005:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-005-0280-5
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-005-0280-5
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Jonathan M. Levitt & Mike Thelwall, 2009. "The most highly cited Library and Information Science articles: Interdisciplinarity, first authors and citation patterns," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 78(1), pages 45-67, January.
    2. Quentin L. Burrell, 2007. "Time-dependent aspects of co-concentration in informetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 73(2), pages 161-174, November.
    3. Jonathan M. Levitt & Mike Thelwall, 2008. "Patterns of annual citation of highly cited articles and the prediction of their citation ranking: A comparison across subjects," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(1), pages 41-60, October.
    4. Leo Egghe, 2007. "Probabilities for encountering genius, basic, ordinary or insignificant papers based on the cumulative nth citation distribution," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 70(1), pages 167-181, January.
    5. Saralees Nadarajah & Samuel Kotz, 2007. "Models for citation behavior," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 72(2), pages 291-305, August.
    6. You Song & Fangling Situ & Hongjun Zhu & Jinzhi Lei, 2018. "To be the Prince to wake up Sleeping Beauty: the rediscovery of the delayed recognition studies," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(1), pages 9-24, October.
    7. Jiang Li, 2014. "Citation curves of “all-elements-sleeping-beauties”: “flash in the pan” first and then “delayed recognition”," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 100(2), pages 595-601, August.
    8. Jianhua Hou & Hao Li & Yang Zhang, 2020. "Identifying the princes base on Altmetrics: An awakening mechanism of sleeping beauties from the perspective of social media," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-28, November.
    9. Jiang Li & Fred Y. Ye, 2012. "The phenomenon of all-elements-sleeping-beauties in scientific literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(3), pages 795-799, September.
    10. Quentin L. Burrell, 2014. "The individual author’s publication–citation process: theory and practice," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(1), pages 725-742, January.
    11. Agnieszka Geras & Grzegorz Siudem & Marek Gagolewski, 2022. "Time to vote: Temporal clustering of user activity on Stack Overflow," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(12), pages 1681-1691, December.

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