Genius work," proposed by Avramescu, refers to scientific articles whose citations grow exponentially in an extended period, for example, over 50 years. Such articles were defined as "sleeping beauties" by van Raan, who quantitatively studied the phenomenon of delayed recognition. However, the criteria adopted by van Raan at times are not applicable and may confer recognition prematurely. To revise such deficiencies, this paper proposes two new criteria, which are applicable (but not limited) to exponential citation curves. We searched for genius work among articles of Nobel Prize laureates during the period of 1901-2012 on the Web of Science, finding 25 articles of genius work out of 21,438 papers including 10 (by van Raan's criteria) sleeping beauties and 15 nonsleeping-beauties. By our new criteria, two findings were obtained through empirical analysis: (a) the awakening periods for genius work depend on the increase rate b in the exponential function, and (b) lower b leads to a longer sleeping period.
In this article we describe another problem with journal impact factors by showing that one journal's impact factor is dependent on other journals' publication delays. The proposed theoretical model predicts a monotonically decreasing function of the impact factor as a function of publication delay, on condition that the citation curve of the journal is monotone increasing during the publication window used in the calculation of the journal impact factor; otherwise, this function has a reversed U shape. Our findings based on simulations are verified by examining three journals in the information sciences: the Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
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