Sleeping beauties in genius work: When were they awakened?

Benford's law is an empirical observation, first reported by Simon Newcomb in 1881 and then independently by Frank Benford in 1938: the first significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically decreasing function. Being contrary to intuition, the law was forgotten as a mere curious observation. However, in the last two decades, relevant literature has grown exponentially, -an evolution typical of "Sleeping Beauties" (SBs) publications that go unnoticed (sleep) for a long time and then suddenly become center of attention (are awakened). Thus, in the present study, we show that Newcomb (1881) and Benford (1938) papers are clearly SBs. The former was in deep sleep for 110 years whereas the latter was in deep sleep for a comparatively lesser period of 31 years up to 1968, and in a state of less deep sleep for another 27 years up to 1995. Both SBs were awakened in the year 1995 by Hill (1995a). In so doing, we show that the waking prince (Hill, 1995a) is more often quoted than the SB whom he kissed, -in this Benford's law case, wondering whether this is a general effect, -to be usefully studied.2.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benford's law: A “sleeping beauty” sleeping in the dirty pages of logarithmic tables

Mir

Ausloos

2017

“…Stimulated by recent research by ourselves—about under‐cited influential publications (see further) (Hu & Rousseau, ; Hu & Rousseau, ) and by others about delayed recognition (Du & Wu, ; Ke, Ferrara, Radicchi, & Flammini, ; Li & Shi, ; Li & Ye, ; van Raan, , ) we became interested in the question if an article can suffer delayed recognition (an aspect of its first forward citation generation) and at the same time be under‐cited influential (an aspect mainly determined by subsequent citation generations). In the natural sciences rare events are often of extreme importance.…”

Section: A Curiosity Driven Investigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently the topic of hibernators has attracted a lot of attention (Du & Wu, ; El Aichouchi & Gorry, ; Ke et al, ; Li, ; Li & Shi, ; Li & Ye, ; van Raan, , ), leading among others to the study of articles that at first receive some attention, then go through a period in which they are hardly noticed, followed by a period of being highly cited, activated by an awakener (Li & Ye, ). Figure shows the citation curve of (Romans, ), a typical hibernator studied by van Raan ().…”

Section: Two Special Types Of Articlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do citation chimeras exist? The case of under‐cited influential articles suffering delayed recognition

Rousseau

2019

In this study we investigate if articles suffering delayed recognition can at the same time be under-cited influential articles. Theoretically these two types of articles are independent, in the sense that suffering delayed recognition depends on the number and time distribution of received citations, while being an under-cited influential article depends only partially on the number of received (first generation) citations, and much more on second and third citation generations. Among 49 articles suffering delayed recognition we found 13 that are also under-cited influential. Based on a thorough investigation of these special cases we found that so-called authoritative citers play an important role in uniting the two different document types into a special citation chimera. Our investigation contributes to the classification of publications.

“…Vector H = (c 1 , …, c i …, c n ) becomes the heartbeat spectrum, where n indicates the duration of the sleeping period. Two further studies (Huang, Hsu, & Ciou, ; Li & Shi, ) deal with the awakening of SBs.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Smart girls” versus “sleeping beauties” in the sciences: The identification of instant and delayed recognition by using the citation angle

Bornmann

2017

In recent years, a number of studies have introduced methods for identifying papers with delayed recognition (so called “sleeping beauties,” SBs) or have presented single publications as cases of SBs. Most recently, Ke, Ferrara, Radicchi, and Flammini (, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 112(24), 7426–7431) proposed the so called “beauty coefficient” (denoted as B) to quantify how much a given paper can be considered as a paper with delayed recognition. In this study, the new term smart girl (SG) is suggested to differentiate instant credit or “flashes in the pan” from SBs. Although SG and SB are qualitatively defined, the dynamic citation angle β is introduced in this study as a simple way for identifying SGs and SBs quantitatively — complementing the beauty coefficient B. The citation angles for all articles from 1980 (n = 166,870) in natural sciences are calculated for identifying SGs and SBs and their extent. We reveal that about 3% of the articles are typical SGs and about 0.1% typical SBs. The potential advantages of the citation angle approach are explained.