'Smart Girls' versus 'Sleeping Beauties' in the Sciences: The Identification of Instant and Delayed Recognition by Using the Citation Angle

摘要

In recent years, a number of studies have introduced methods for identifyingpapers with delayed recognition (so called "sleeping beauties", SBs) or havepresented single publications as cases of SBs. Most recently, Ke et al. (2015)proposed the so called "beauty coefficient" (denoted as B) to quantify how mucha given paper can be considered as a paper with delayed recognition. In thisstudy, the new term "smart girl" (SG) is suggested to differentiate instantcredit or "flashes in the pan" from SBs. While SG and SB are qualitativelydefined, the dynamic citation angle \b{eta} is introduced in this study as asimple way for identifying SGs and SBs quantitatively - complementing thebeauty coefficient B. The citation angles for all articles from 1980 (n=166870)in natural sciences are calculated for identifying SGs and SBs and theirextent. We reveal that about 3% of the articles are typical SGs and about 0.1%typical SBs. The potential advantages of the citation angle approach areexplained.