We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
The occurrence of 'Sleeping Beauty' publications in medical research: Their scientific impact and technological relevance.
- Authors
van Raan, Anthony F. J.; Winnink, Jos J.
- Abstract
We investigate publications in medical research that have gone unnoticed for a number of years after being published and then suddenly become cited to a significant degree. Such publications are called Sleeping Beauties (SBs). This study focuses on SBs that are cited in patents. We find that the increasing trend of the relative number of SBs comes to an end around 1998. However, still a constant fraction of publications becomes an SB. Many SBs become highly cited publications, they even belong to the top-10 to 20% most cited publications in their field. We measured the scaling of the number of SBs in relation to the sleeping period length, during-sleep citation-intensity, and with awakening citation-intensity. We determined the Grand Sleeping Beauty Equation for these medical SBs which shows that the probability of awakening after a period of deep sleep is becoming rapidly smaller for longer sleeping periods and that the probability for higher awakening intensities decreases extremely rapidly. The exponents of the scaling functions show a time-dependent behavior which suggests a decreasing occurrence of SBs with longer sleeping periods. We demonstrate that the fraction of SBs cited by patents before scientific awakening exponentially increases. This finding shows that the technological time lag is becoming shorter than the sleeping time. Inventor-author self-citations may result in shorter technological time lags, but this effect is small. Finally, we discuss characteristics of an SBs that became one of the highest cited medical papers ever.
- Subjects
MEDICAL research; ART theory; RELEVANCE; RESEARCH
- Publication
PLoS ONE, 2019, Vol 14, Issue 10, p1
- ISSN
1932-6203
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0223373