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

Breakthrough potential of emerging research topics based on citation diffusion features

This article uses the characteristics of citation curves in emerging research topics (ERTs) and combines them with the ERTs’ knowledge bases to draw conclusions by comparing their development patterns. The goal of this study is to enrich the toolset for predicting breakthroughs in scientific research. A set of multidimensional and practical bibliometric indicators is used to identify ERTs, to further identify the knowledge bases of ERTs and construct citation curves for both ERTs and their knowledge bases. The development trends of the citation curves of ERTs and their knowledge bases in different time periods are compared and analysed from two dimensions: knowledge transition and continuous growth. We use the field of stem cell research to test our method. Based on the outcome of the analysis, we can assess the breakthrough potential of ERTs. The stratification, transition and recent changes of the citation curve can be used as a basis for analysing and assessing the ERTs’ breakthrough potential. The combination of different citation diffusion patterns of ERTs and their knowledge bases can improve the effectiveness of identifying ERTs that can become breakthrough innovations.

Using the catastrophe theory to discover transformative research topics

This study approaches the identification and prediction of transformative research topics by using the concepts of catastrophe theory. Based on the evaluation model of catastrophe theory, 11 indicators were selected for four different aspects: growth rate, economic and social influence, network characteristics and the degree of uncertainty in evaluating an emerging topics’ transformative potential. The stem cell research field is used as case study. The results of this study show that there are differences between various emerging research topics (ERTs) within the stem cell research field and their potential ability to induce changes and innovation. The method developed in this article is able to identify and predict the future transformative potential of ERTs and provides reference information for scientific and technological planning, industrial policy and scientific research management.

Large-scale analysis of delayed recognition using sleeping beauty and the prince

Delayed recognition in which innovative discoveries are re-evaluated after a long period has significant implications for scientific progress. The quantitative method to detect delayed recognition is described as the pair of Sleeping Beauty (SB) and its Prince (PR), where SB refers to citation bursts and its PR triggers SB's awakeness calculated based on their citation history. This research provides the methods to extract valid and large SB-PR pairs from a comprehensive Scopus dataset and analyses how PR discovers SB. We prove that the proposed method can extract long-sleep and large-scale SB and its PR best covers the previous multi-disciplinary pairs, which enables to observe delayed recognition. Besides, we show that the high-impact SB-PR pairs extracted by the proposed method are more likely to be located in the same field. This indicates that a hidden SB that your research can awaken may exist closer than you think. On the other hand, although SB-PR pairs are fat-tailed in Beauty Coefficient and more likely to integrate separate fields compared to ordinary citations, it is not possible to predict which citation leads to awake SB using the rarity of citation. There is no easy way to limit the areas where SB-PR pairs occur or detect it early, suggesting that researchers and administrators need to focus on a variety of areas. This research provides comprehensive knowledge about the development of scientific findings that will be evaluated over time.

Sleeping beauties gain impact in overdrive mode

In this study we focus on characteristics of SBs that have not or hardly been investigated previously. We find that the choice of the awakening period in the selection of SBs has consequences for the measured citation patterns. Focusing on medical SBs we analyze patterns in the time-development of the citation impact of SBs; the influence of self-citations on the awakening process; and the occurrence of medical research fields to which the SBs and their citing papers belong. An important finding is that SBs are generally characterized by a sleep that becomes less and less deep instead of a permanent deep sleep. The sleeping period is followed by a phase-transition-like jump as a start of the awakening period and a remarkable regularity is found for the citation impact immediately before and after the jump.

Sleeping Beauties of Coronavirus Research

A "Sleeping Beauty" (SB) in science is a metaphor for a scholarly publication that remains relatively unnoticed by the related communities for a long time; - the publication is "sleeping". However, suddenly due to the appearance of some phenomenon, such a "forgotten" publication may become a center of scientific attention; - the SB is "awakened". Currently, there are specific scientific areas for which sleeping beauties (SBs) are awakened. For example, as the world is experiencing the COVID-19 global pandemic (triggered by SARS-CoV-2), publications on coronaviruses appear to be awakened. Thus, one can raise questions of scientific interest: are these publications coronavirus related SBs? Moreover, while much literature exists on other coronaviruses, there seems to be no comprehensive investigation on COVID-19, - in particular in the context of SBs. Nowadays, such SB papers can be even used for sustaining literature reviews and/or scientific claims about COVID-19. In our study, in order to pinpoint pertinent SBs, we use the "beauty score" (B-score) measure. The Activity Index (AI) and the Relative Specialization Index (RSI) are also calculated to compare countries where such SBs appear. Results show that most of these SBs were published previously to the present epidemic time (triggered by SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), and are awakened in 2020. Besides outlining the most important SBs, we show from what countries and institutions they originate, and the most prolific author(s) of such SBs. The citation trend of SBs that have the highest B-score is also discussed.

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

In science, sleeping beauties (SBs) denotes a special phenomenon of the diffusion of scientific knowledge based on citation trajectories, the awakening of which is also measured through changes in the citations index. However, the rapid advancement of social media has altered the mode of scientific communication and knowledge diffusion. This study aims to re-identify SBs and its Prince from the perspective of comprehensive indicators, which involves the analysis of Altmetrics indexes and Citation index, and investigate the awakening mechanism of A-SB to supplement the research on the awakening mechanism of SBs. By combining Ab index, we redefined the Prince, which makes A-SB receive high attention after a long Sleeping period and reflects the most prominent academic or social behavior that awakens and sustains the Awakening of A-SB. Then we conducted empirical research on the retrieved PLOS Biology collection and examined Prince after identifying the A-SB. The analysis and summary of the characteristics of the identified A-SB and Prince revealed the SBs’ awakening mechanism under the comprehensive trajectory based on Altmetrics from the three dimensions of the influence between the indicators, the overall evolution trajectory of A-SB, and literature bibliometric attributes. In the trajectory of Delayed Recognition stage of A-SB, we define the Dogsleep of SBs, which mirrors that the instability of the Sleeping of SBs will generate a specific negative impact on Prince of A-SB and Awakening intensity. Besides, the literature bibliometric attributes cannot reflect the tendency of users to read academic papers, which again proves that the traditional citation index cannot be neglected in the awakening mechanism of A-SB. Overall, this study demonstrates the addition of the Altmetrics indexes as a useful complement, illustrating the inheritance and connection between the SBs based on the comprehensive trajectory and the SBs based on the citation diffusion trajectory.

The occurrence of 'Sleeping Beauty' publications in medical research: Their scientific impact and technological relevance

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.

The Value of Evidence

We strive to put evidence into action to promote optimal nursing care, regardless of whether those care practices are brand new or decades old.

Delayed recognition: recent developments and a proposal to study this phenomenon as a fuzzy concept

Purpose

New developments in the study of delayed recognition are discussed.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on these new developments a method is proposed to characterize delayed recognition as a fuzzy concept.

Findings

A benchmark value of 0.333 corresponding with linear growth is obtained. Moreover, a case is discovered in which an expert found delayed recognition several years before citation analysis could discover this phenomenon.

Research limitations

As all citation studies also this one is database dependent.

Practical implications

Delayed recognition is turned into a fuzzy concept.

Originality/value

The article presents a new way of studying delayed recognition.

Identifying "hot papers" and papers with "delayed recognition" in large-scale datasets by using dynamically normalized citation impact scores

"Hot papers" (HPs) are papers which received a boost of citations shortly after publication. Papers with "delayed recognition" (DRs) received scarcely impact over a long time period, before a considerable citation boost started. DRs have attracted a lot of attention in scientometrics and beyond. Based on a comprehensive dataset with more than 5,000,000 papers published between 1980 and 1990, we identified HPs and DRs. In contrast to many other studies on DRs, which are based on raw citation counts, we calculated dynamically field-normalized impact scores for the search of HPs and DRs. This study is intended to investigate the differences between HPs (n = 323) and DRs (n = 315). The investigation of the journals which have published HPs and DRs revealed that some journals (e.g. Physical Review Letters and PNAS) were able to publish significantly more HPs than other journals. This pattern did not appear in DRs. Many HPs and DRs have been published by authors from the USA; however, in contrast to other countries, authors from the USA have published statistically significantly more HPs than DRs. Whereas "Biochemistry & Molecular Biology," "Immunology," and "Cell Biology" have published significantly more HPs than DRs, the opposite result arrived for "Surgery" and "Orthopedics." The results of the analysis of certain properties of HPs and DRs (e.g. number of pages) suggest that the emergence of DRs is an unpredictable process.

Where are the sleeping beauties and princes in educational technology journals?

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an affective computing-based method of identifying sleeping beauties and their princes in five educational technology journals.

Design/methodology/approach

This study develops an information technology-based methodology to analyze sleeping beauties in the field of educational technology. The authors seek to determine the characteristics of studies which trigger the awakening of sleeping beauties (called “princes”). The keywords and Hirsch index (H-index) are used as two essential analysis indicators.

Findings

Between 2000 and 2015, these five journals included 7,864 articles with a total of 77,700 citations and 24,312 keywords. This study identified articles as being in deep sleep (75.7 percent), less deep sleep (14.7 percent), and awakening (5.5 percent) states. According to the analytical results, 431 of 7,864 articles are qualified as “sleeping beauties.” Of the 431 sleeping beauties identified, 232 articles were awakened by trend princes, while 286 were awakened by H-index princes. A total of 128 sleeping beauties were awakened by both prince types. Besides, impact factors (IFs) of journals do not have a significant effect on the number of sleeping articles.

Research limitations/implications

There are two main research limitations in this study. The first one is the amount of target journals. Only five well-known educational technology journals are analyzed in this research. There may be more valuable sleeping publications in other journals not been found. The second limitation is that the authors merely pick up the lead author of citing papers as the indicator to determine the H-index prince. The contributions of the rest of authors are not taken are not taken into consideration. These limitations should be further studied.

Originality/value

To the knowledge, this study is the first one reporting the identification of sleeping beauty and princes in educational technology field. Furthermore, the authors devise an informational method to determine sleeping publications, sleeping beauty, and princes. A systematic analysis of five well-known journals in the field of educational technology field confirms the existence of “sleeping beauties.” It is reported that improvements to a journal’s IF are positively correlated to increased numbers of sleeping beauties being awakened. To reduce the number of such articles, or to reduce the overall sleeping duration, journal editors should not only seek to raise the journal’s IF, but also strategically select keywords for maximum visibility, and promote articles to high H-index authors.

Do younger Sleeping Beauties prefer a technological prince?

In this paper we investigate recent Sleeping Beauties cited in patents (SB-SNPRs). We find that the increasing trend of the relative number of SBs stopped around 1998. Moreover, we find that the time lag between the publication year of the SB-SNPRs and their first citation in a patent is becoming shorter in recent years. Our observations also suggest that, on average, in the more recent years SBs are awakened increasingly earlier by a ‘technological prince’ rather than by a ‘scientific prince’. These observations suggest that SBs with technological importance are ‘discovered’ earlier in an application-oriented context. Then, because of this earlier recognized technological relevance, papers may be cited also earlier in a scientific context. Thus early recognized technological relevance may ‘prevent’ papers to become an SB. The scientific impact of Sleeping Beauties is generally not necessarily related to the technological importance of the SBs, as far as measured with number and impact of the citing patents. The analysis of the occurrence of inventor-author relations as well as the citation years of inventor-author patents suggest that the scientific awakening of Sleeping Beauties only rarely occurs by inventor-author self-citation.

A Bibliometric Framework for Identifying “Princes” Who Wake up the “Sleeping Beauty” in Challenge-type Scientific Discoveries

Purpose

This paper develops and validates a bibliometric framework for identifying the “princes” (PR) who wake up the “sleeping beauty” (SB) in challenge-type scientific discoveries, so as to figure out the awakening mechanisms, and promote potentially valuable but not readily accepted innovative research. (A PR is a research study.)

Design/methodology/approach

We propose that PR candidates must meet the following four criteria: (1) be published near the time when the SB began to attract a lot of citations; (2) be highly cited papers themselves; (3) receive a substantial number of co-citations with the SB; and (4) within the challenge-type discoveries which contradict established theories, the “pulling effect” of the PR on the SB must be strong. We test the usefulness of the bibliometric framework through a case study of a key publication by the 2014 chemistry Nobel laureate Stefan W. Hell, who negated Ernst Abbe’s diffraction limit theory, one of the most prominent paradigms in the natural sciences.

Findings

The first-ranked candidate PR article identified by the bibliometric framework is in line with historical facts. An SB may need one or more PRs and even “retinues” to be “awakened.” Documents with potential awakening functionality tend to be published in prestigious multidisciplinary journals with higher impact and wider scope than the journals publishing SBs.

Research limitations

The above framework is only applicable to transformative innovations, and the conclusions are drawn from the analysis of one typical SB and her awakening process. Therefore the generality of our work might be limited.

Practical implications

Publications belonging to so-called transformative research, even when less frequently cited, should be given special attention as early as possible, because they may suddenly attract many citations after a period of sleep, as reflected in our case study.

Originality/value

The definition of PR(s) as the first paper(s) that cited the SB article (selfciting excluded) has its limitations. Instead, the SB-PR co-citations should be given priority in current environment of scholarly communication. Since the “premature” or “transformative” breakthroughs in the challenge-type SB documents are either beyond the current knowledge domain, or violate established paradigms, people’s psychological distance from the SB is larger than that from the PR, which explains why the annual citations of the PR are usually higher than those of the SB, especially prior to or during the SB’s citation boom period.

Exploring an Unknown Territory: "Sleeping Beauties" in the Nursing Research Literature

BACKGROUND

Sleeping Beauties (SBs) are publications that are scarcely cited in the years immediately following publication but then suddenly become highly cited later. Such publications have unique citation patterns and can reveal important developments in the field in which they appear.

OBJECTIVES

No holistic analysis of nursing SBs has been done yet. The aim of this study was to identify and analyze the SB phenomenon in the nursing research literature.

METHOD

The corpus for the nursing SB identification was harvested from the Web of Science Core Collection (Thomas Reuters) for the period 1934-2015. Citation histories of 212,239 publications were screened. From those, 3,209 publications with more than 100 citations were selected for analysis. We used our own software and applied the van Raan (2004) and Baumgartner (2010) criteria for SBs-a 5-year sleeping period with at most 10 citations during that time, an average of at least five citations per year after the first 10 years, with at least 100 citations in total. The knowledge context for SBs was determined using citing papers. All citing papers were analyzed with the help of VOSviewer software.

RESULTS

Nine publications were identified as SBs (prevalence of 0.004%). The length of sleep duration ranged from 5 to 10 years (M = 6.8, SD = 2.0), depth of sleep ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 citations (M = 0.6, SD = 0.2), and awake intensity ranged from 6.4 to 15.0 citations (M = 11.0, SD = 3.8). The average number of citations to SBs was 229. Most nursing SBs were produced in the United States (n = 8) from top institutions in journals with high-impact factors. Nursing SBs covered topics including resilience, sampling in qualitative research, metasynthesis, postoperative pain in children, dementia rating scales, care of patients with Alzheimer's disease, nursing theory related to fatigue mechanisms in cancer patients, and family participation during resuscitation. Nursing SBs were cited by authors from a large number of institutions and countries; the number of publications citing nursing SBs is growing exponentially and showing increasing and global interest in the research presented in them.

DISCUSSION

This study demonstrated that SBs in nursing are similar to other scientific disciplines. Existence of SBs suggests that nursing knowledge accumulation is supported by research and professional processes similar to those that emerged in other academic disciplines.

Sleeping beauties in pediatrics

Sleeping beauties (SBs) in science have been known for few decades; however, it seems that only recently have they become popular. An SB is a publication that "sleeps" for a long time and then almost suddenly awakes and becomes highly cited. SBs present interesting findings in science. Pediatrics research literature has not yet been analyzed for their presence, and 5 pediatrics SBs were discovered in this research. Their prevalence was approximately 0.011%. Some environments or periods are more "SB fertile" than others: 3 of 5 SBs were published in the journal Pediatrics, 4 originated from the United States, and 4 were published in the period from 1992 to 1993. No institutions or authors published more than 1 SB.

Patent Citations Analysis and Its Value in Research Evaluation: A Review and a New Approach to Map Technology-relevant Research

Purpose

First, to review the state-of-the-art in patent citation analysis, particularly characteristics of patent citations to scientific literature (scientific non-patent references, SNPRs). Second, to present a novel mapping approach to identify technology-relevant research based on the papers cited by and referring to the SNPRs.

Design/methodology/approach

In the review part we discuss the context of SNPRs such as the time lags between scientific achievements and inventions. Also patent-to-patent citation is addressed particularly because this type of patent citation analysis is a major element in the assessment of the economic value of patents. We also review the research on the role of universities and researchers in technological development, with important issues such as universities as sources of technological knowledge and inventor-author relations. We conclude the review part of this paper with an overview of recent research on mapping and network analysis of the science and technology interface and of technological progress in interaction with science. In the second part we apply new techniques for the direct visualization of the cited and citing relations of SNPRs, the mapping of the landscape around SNPRs by bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis, and the mapping of the conceptual environment of SNPRs by keyword co-occurrence analysis.

Findings

We discuss several properties of SNPRs. Only a small minority of publications covered by the Web of Science or Scopus are cited by patents, about 3%–4%. However, for publications based on university-industry collaboration the number of SNPRs is considerably higher, around 15%. The proposed mapping methodology based on a “second order SNPR approach” enables a better assessment of the technological relevance of research.

Research limitations

The main limitation is that a more advanced merging of patent and publication data, in particular unification of author and inventor names, in still a necessity.

Practical implications

The proposed mapping methodology enables the creation of a database of technology-relevant papers (TRPs). In a bibliometric assessment the publications of research groups, research programs or institutes can be matched with the TRPs and thus the extent to which the work of groups, programs or institutes are relevant for technological development can be measured.

Originality/value

The review part examines a wide range of findings in the research of patent citation analysis. The mapping approach to identify a broad range of technology-relevant papers is novel and offers new opportunities in research evaluation practices.

Sleeping beauties cited in patents: Is there also a dormitory of inventions?

A ‘Sleeping Beauty in Science’ is a publication that goes unnoticed (‘sleeps’) for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attracts a lot of attention (‘is awakened by a prince’). In our foregoing study we found that roughly half of the Sleeping Beauties are application-oriented and thus are potential Sleeping Innovations. In this paper we investigate a new topic: Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents. In this way we explore the existence of a dormitory of inventions. To our knowledge this is the first study of this kind. We investigate the time lag between publication of the Sleeping Beauty and the first citation by a patent. We find that patent citation may occur before or after the awakening and that the depth of the sleep, i.e., citation rate during the sleeping period, is no predictor for later scientific or technological impact of the Sleeping Beauty. A surprising finding is that Sleeping Beauties are significantly more cited in patents than ‘normal’ papers. Inventor–author self-citations relations occur only in a small minority of the Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents, but other types of inventor–author links occur more frequently. We develop an approach in different steps to explore the cognitive environment of Sleeping Beauties cited in patents. First, we analyze whether they deal with new topics by measuring the time-dependent evolution in the entire scientific literature of the number of papers related to both the precisely defined topics as well as the broader research theme of the Sleeping Beauty during and after the sleeping time. Second, we focus on the awakening by analyzing the first group of papers that cites the Sleeping Beauty. Third, we create concept maps of the topic-related and the citing papers for a time period immediately following the awakening and for the most recent period. Finally, we make an extensive assessment of the cited and citing relations of the Sleeping Beauty. We find that tunable co-citation analysis is a powerful tool to discover the prince(s) and other important application-oriented work directly related to the Sleeping Beauty, for instance papers written by authors who cite Sleeping Beauties in both the patents of which they are the inventors, as well as in their scientific papers.

Citation context and impact of 'sleeping beauties' in paediatric research

Objectives 'Sleeping beauties', i.e. publications that are not cited for a long while, present interesting findings in science. This study analysed the citation trends of sleeping beauties in paediatric research. Methods The study used bibliometric software to analyse the papers citing sleeping beauties in paediatric research, to understand the context in which paediatric sleeping beauties were finally cited and the impact of these sleeping beauties on paediatric research. Results Two paediatric sleeping beauties, addressing medical homes and the transition from paediatric to adult health care, respectively, awakened in response to organizational needs. Both presented novel concepts of paediatric service organization that became important because of an increased need for optimization of services. Conclusion All sleeping beauties bring new knowledge that becomes important only after several years. Paediatric sleeping beauties exhibited unique characteristics; however, their presence in paediatric research shows that knowledge acquisition in paediatrics resembles that in other disciplines.