Abstract
In science, sleeping papers, previously known as “Sleeping Beauties”, refer to scientific papers that are recognized by the scientific community after a long hibernation period following their publication. Many factors may contribute to their delayed yet exceptional popularity, such as the introduction of new technologies or ideas that are beyond the capabilities at the time of publication. The recognition of a sleeping paper, often through a paper that cites the sleeping paper and has a profound impact on the research area, is important to the scientific community. Here, we proposed a method to identify the paper that rediscovers a sleeping paper, known as a rediscovering paper, based on the citation network of the sleeping paper. Based on the 15 rediscovering papers obtained from the top sleeping papers in science, we introduced 5 feature indices of the leading authors of these rediscovering papers (rediscovering authors) defined by an academic search system AMiner (https://cn.aminer.org/). The 5 feature indices depict academic achievements of researchers from various aspects: Publication, Citation, Longevity, H-index and Sociability. The rediscovering authors lead to most general scientific authors in the 5 feature indices. Our results reveal common features of potential rediscovering authors in the scientific community who may play significant roles in the propagation of citation networks.
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Notes
Here, we note that the recognized time is different from that defined in Ke et al. (2015). According to the definition in Ke et al. (2015), the recognized time of the sleeping paper No. 14 was 1994; however, the first citation was at 1996 according to WoS. Hence, the definition in Ke et al. (2015) is not applicable to our data source.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91430101).
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Song, Y., Situ, F., Zhu, H. et al. To be the Prince to wake up Sleeping Beauty: the rediscovery of the delayed recognition studies. Scientometrics 117, 9–24 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2830-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2830-7