Sleeping Beauties Cited in Patents: Is there also a Dormitory of Inventions?
Anthony F. J. van Raan

TL;DR
This study investigates the occurrence and impact of Sleeping Beauties in science that are cited in patents, revealing insights into their awakening patterns, citation relationships, and the potential for discovering related application-oriented work.
Contribution
It introduces an analysis of Sleeping Beauties in patents, exploring their citation dynamics, inventor-author links, and the use of co-citation analysis to identify related innovations.
Findings
Patent citation can occur before or after awakening.
Citation rate during sleep does not predict impact.
Co-citation analysis helps identify related application work.
Abstract
A Sleeping Beauty in Science is a publication that goes unnoticed (sleeps) for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attracts a lot of attention (is awakened by a prince). In our foregoing study we found that roughly half of the Sleeping Beauties are application-oriented and thus are potential Sleeping Innovations. In this paper we investigate a new topic: Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents. In this way we explore the existence of a dormitory of inventions. We find that patent citation may occur before or after the awakening and that the depth of the sleep, i.e., citation rate during the sleeping period, is no predictor for later scientific or technological impact of the Sleeping Beauty. Inventor-author self-citations occur only in a small minority of the Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents, but other types of inventor-author links occur more frequently. We analyze…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGenetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research · scientometrics and bibliometrics research
