Why and how can “sleeping beauties” be awakened?

Abstract

Purpose“Sleeping beauties” are very common in science, so this paper aims to uncover the reasons and formulation mechanism of information awakening on a more general level. Based on this, the paper will further propose useful strategies to awaken those “sleeping beauties” earlier.Design/methodology/approachExplanation‐building of case study is used to develop some models of information awakening and also to uncover different types of reasons for triggering academic information to be awakened.FindingsBased on the three basic elements of information utilisation, namely, information value, access channel and user needs, the paper summarises several reasons for information awakening: the information value is re‐mined because of the relevance among various information; different uses of information are discovered; information availability and visibility are improved; information is placed into the appropriate place; and, with time passing by, demands for the information rise.Practical implicationsThe presence of excessive “sleeping beauties” is not only a kind of idleness and waste to knowledge, but also may result in aggravation of information redundancy and increasing cost of storage. The revelation of its essence and reasons is not only helpful to establish better management mechanism to awaken “sleeping beauties” and thus to maximise their value, but also helpful to distinguish “sleeping beauties” from “pseudo‐sleeping beauties” as early as possible, so that all that worthless information can be cleared up without hesitation.Originality/valueMost existing studies remain on the level of collecting instances and interpreting specific cases, but this paper investigates reasons from a more general level. What is more, current understandings are very one‐sided in that they treat information awakening and delayed recognition as the same, so this paper clarifies their differentiation and summarises the reasons comprehensively.

Identifying the princes base on Altmetrics: An awakening mechanism of sleeping beauties from the perspective of social media

“…The phenomenon of the evolution of scientific literature has attracted the attention of researchers as early as the early 1960s, at which time the phenomenon of scientific literature evolution was also termed "Resisted Discovery" [4], "Premature Discovery" [5], and "Delayed Recognition" [6]. From the perspective of citation network, SBs is essentially a distinct phenomenon of the diffusion of scientific knowledge based on citation trajectories, which reveals a crucial mechanism for the diffusion of scientific information through citations [3], and is indispensable for scientific development [7,8]. We refer to the SBs under this perspective as Citation-based Sleeping Beauty (C-SB).…”

Dormitory of Physical and Engineering Sciences: Sleeping Beauties May Be Sleeping Innovations

“…Stent [ 5 ] discusses ‘prematurity’ in scientific discovery. Recent studies focus on the probability of becoming highly cited in later years [ 6 ]; the occurrence of delayed recognition [ 7 ]; SBs in psychology [ 8 ] and in physics (‘revived classics’ [ 9 ]; an example of awaked application-oriented work [ 10 ]); the probability of SBs [ 11 ]; a typology of behavioral patterns in citation histories of SBs [ 12 , 13 ]; extreme historical cases [ 14 ]; the reasons for awakening [ 15 ]; SBs with a short leaping immediately after publication [ 16 , 17 ]; different types of SBs in a specific journal [ 18 ]; SBs and ‘durability’ of scientific publications in general and its effects on research performance assessments by citation analysis [ 19 – 21 ]; SBs in the work of Nobel Prize winners and the dependence of the awake intensity on the citation distribution within the sleeping period [ 22 ]; the identification of the ‘princes’ [ 23 ].…”

Sleeping beauties in psychology

“…Table 2 provides some summary data about these citations and their periods of rest. Table 2 about here Figures 1, 2, and 3 show the how each of these papers lay dormant for forty years or more before being awakened, by a 'prince' (Braun et al, 2010;Van Raan, 2005;Wang et al, 2012). However, what we have not shown in this article is why these particular papers were awakened after such delays, and by whom.…”