Essay by Geoffrey Smith: “…Bibliometricians have a name for papers like Shimomura’s; they call them “sleeping beauties.” A sleeping beauty is published, ignored, and then, sometimes a generation later, kissed awake. The fairy-tale framing is a little twee, but it points at something unsettling about how knowledge grows. We tend to picture the scientific literature as a frontier that moves forward. The sleeping beauties suggest it is closer to an attic, where things of great value lie in boxes that no one has thought to open. And we are now building machines that can open all the boxes at once.
The term comes originally from Anthony van Raan, a professor of quantitative studies of science at Leiden University. In a 2004 paper in Scientometrics, he defined a “Sleeping Beauty in Science” as a publication that goes unnoticed for a long time and then, fairly abruptly, draws a great deal of attention, and he reported what he believed was the first extensive measurement of how often this happens. He scored papers on three criteria: how long they slept, how deeply (the average number of citations during the dormant period), and how intensely they woke (the citations received in the four years after). Using somewhat arbitrary thresholds, he found sleeping beauties at a rate of about 0.01 percent of papers published in a given year (Aghayeva, Works in Progress).
That number made the phenomenon look like a rarity, a handful of mispriced assets in an otherwise efficient market. It did not hold up. In 2015, a team at Indiana University led by Qing Ke and Alessandro Flammini returned to the question with far more data. They introduced a single measure capturing both the intensity of a paper’s recognition and the length of its sleep, and concluded that sleeping beauties are far from exceptional. They noted that earlier estimates of scarcity depended heavily on arbitrary thresholds applied to small or single-discipline datasets. Drawing on 384,649 papers from American Physical Society journals and more than 22 million from Web of Science, they found a wide, continuous range of delayed recognition in every scientific field, and raised the estimated share of sleeping beauties at least 100-fold over van Raan’s (Aghayeva, Works in Progress). Delayed recognition, in other words, is not a curious exception. It is a normal part of how science works…(More)”.
