Classifying Sleeping Beauties and Princes Using Citation Rarity

摘要

The scientific community sometimes resists important scientific findings initially. This is the so-called "delayed recognition." A "sleeping beauty (SB)," a representative phenomenon of delayed recognition, is a paper reported by a Prince (PR) paper. The SB includes many key breakthrough concepts for resolving scientific problems. Although many PRs discover their SBs, it is still unknown how they do that because the citation culture differs depending on the category of the paper. This study classifies SBs and their PR pairs using citation rarity within clusters that represent a unique category of a paper. Results show that citation rarity corresponds to the types of contributions to PR papers. Rare citations explore methodological insights into PR fields. Meanwhile, common citations can lead to rediscovery of the core concepts of a sleeping beauty. Furthermore, informatics and materials sciences cover major studies that include citations for SBs, whereas biological subjects find key papers through rediscovery. Results indicate that different categories of citations yield different types of SBs.