A Study On Systematic Identification Of "Sleeping Beauty" Publications And On Their Awaking Mechanisms

A "Sleeping Beauty"(SB)in Scienceis a publication that goes unnoticed(or"sleeps")for a long time and then,almost suddenly,attracts a lot of attention(or "is awakened by a Prince").This concept is actually a quantitative description of"delayed recognition of scientific achievements",a phenomenon widely discussed in sociology of science."Premature discoveries" and "transformative innovations" are crucial for the development of science,but they are often initially neglected or resisted by the scientific community and thus are often subject to delayed recognition.In this dissertation,the author plans to study on systematic identification of SB publications and on their awaking mechanisms.This study extended the application scope of citation analysis,and provided implications for identifying potential "ahead of time" discoveries or transformative research,and shortening time lag for original research to get recognized.Firstly,the author developed a systematic methodology for identifying the Sleeping Beauty(SB)publications and tried to figure out their key characteristics.Based on the identification framework of "beauty coefficient"(B)introduced by Ke et al.(2015),taking into account the whole citation history of the publications concerned,we substituted yearly citations in "beauty coefficient" with yearly accumulative percentage of citations,and eliminated the denominator in "beauty coefficient" since the curve of a given document's accumulative citations is always monotonically increasing if only the document is cited.The value of the modified beauty coefficient is denoted as Bcp.We also redefined the awakening year,sleeping length and sleeping depth within the Bcp framework with the intention of avoiding arbitrary thresholds as much as possible.We tested the new index using the data of SB articles identified from Science and Nature.The results showed that Bcp is more sensitive in identifying the "lower level SBs",which refers to the case when the total citations and the maximum annual citations of SBs are not so high in comparison with other typical SBs.Bcp works better than B in at least two aspects:(1)it "punishes" the situations when the SBs experienced early citations instead of continuous sleeping;(2)it allows for comparing the extent of delayed citation impact of publications in different fields with different citation patterns.The author also figured out some key characteristics of SB publications.The content of sleeping beauty papers tends to be multi-discipline research and most of which tend to be published in prestigious multidisciplinary journals with higher impact and wider scope.One is perhaps more inclined to believe that Sleeping Beauties relate to more fundamental and basic,and less to application-oriented work.But a surprising finding is that half of the SB are application oriented and significantly more cited in patents than 'normal' papers.The SB's first citation in a patent usually appears to be earlier than the awakening year.The percentage of SB in the scientific non-patent references cited by the key patents that protect the innovative drugs in the US FDA Orange Book is more than 'normal'papers,which,in turn,demonstrated the potential technical and application-research properties of Sleeping Beauties.The key publications and pioneering works of the recent Nobel Prize winners for physiology and medicine are delayed-cited rather early-cited in the entire citation life-time of an article.Secondly,this dissertation tried to identify the 'princes'(PR)—the papers that wake up sleeping beauties from their slumbers with an important citation.The author developed and validated a bibliometric framework for identifying the "princes" who wake up the SB in challenge-type scientific discoveries,so as to figure out the awakening mechanisms,and promote potentially valuable but not readily accepted innovative research.The author proposed 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 showed that the first-ranked candidate PR article identified by the bibliometric framework is in line with historic facts.The definition of PR(s)as the first non-self citing paper(s)to the SB 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.The author summarized six type of awakening mechanisms through a retrospective analysis of typical cases,combined with a detailed citation analysis of a set of sleeping beauties together with that of the corresponding princes(if any).The awakening patterns include 1)translating the innovative concept to practice,2)awakened by other research fields that is different from the SB's,3)more than one sleeping beauty publications were awakened by one Prince,that would indicate a well-planned research front,rather than an unexpected hit,4)new innovative technique awakened after modified or avoided adverse events risks,5)secondly literature,such as reviews,guidelines or books citing awakening,6)technology driven major scientific discoveries/theory awakening.Thirdly,the author tried to explore the critical markers for assessing the hidden value of less cited papers by linking article recommendations in Faculty of 1000 with citations in Scopus,and setting "articles with high recommendation scores but low citations" as the observed sample,and "articles with low recommendation scores but high citations" as the control.F1000 recommendations have been assessed as a potential data source for research evaluation,but the reasons for differences between F1000 Article Factor(FFa scores)and citations remain unexplored.By linking recommendations for 28,254 publications in F1000 with citations in Scopus,we investigated the effect of research level(basic,clinical,mixed)and article type on the internal consistency of assessments based on citations and FFa scores.Research level has little impact on the differences between the two evaluation tools,while article type has a big effect.These two measures differ significantly for two groups:1)non-primary research or evidence-based research are more highly cited but not highly recommended,while 2)translational research or transformative research are more highly recommended but gather fewer citations.This can be expected since citation activity is usually practiced by academic authors while the potential for scientific revolutions and the suitability for clinical practice of an article should be investigated from a practitioners' perspective.Finally,we pondered some policy implications associated with SB publications.The first is SB publications and transformative research.Transformative research refers to research that shifts or disrupts established scientific paradigms,can be regarded as the key clue for the early prediction of sleeping beauty literature.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.The author suggested that scholars in scientometrics and library and information science should initiate the research for identifying transformative ideas.We could identify transformative research through some text terms(such as disagree,overcome,break,dispute…).With regard to such suspended transformative research,we suggested whether or not these documents are cited in early patent should be paid attention to.The second concerns SB publications and research fronts.The research front(s)studies based on citation analysis and visualization methods were one of most important topics in informetrics.However,research front and research frontier are different terms,which translated into same Chinese Word.The former usually took the "fast-highly cited papers" as basic data,and latter tend to be revealed by the delay-highly cited papers from the perspective of scientists,as is shown in terms of the landmark characteristic of the top ten sleeping beauty publications identified with Bcp.The Bcp index proposed in this paper may be used to identify the papers at the sleeping-awakening interface,which provided new tools for arousing attention of the science community to previously overlooked but important research.The third is SB publications and research evaluation.Since the major achievements often encounter delayed recognition than the hot tracking research,it is recommended that citation delay reflected by Bcp can be used as an important index to evaluate the academic quality of papers and it is suggested to moderately extend the evaluation cycle.In bibliometric-based research assessment,one should give special attention to papers with a higher value of Bcp,because such papers accumulate their citations slowly and show a longer and durable citation impact.