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

TL;DR

This study introduces the citation angle as a new quantitative method to distinguish between instant recognition ('smart girls') and delayed recognition ('sleeping beauties') in scientific publications, complementing existing metrics.

Contribution

The paper proposes the citation angle or identifying instant versus delayed recognition of papers, providing a simple, quantitative tool alongside the beauty coefficient.

Findings

Approximately 3% of articles are 'smart girls' with instant recognition.

About 0.1% of articles are 'sleeping beauties' with delayed recognition.

The citation angle method offers potential advantages for bibliometric analysis.

Abstract

In recent years, a number of studies have introduced methods for identifying papers with delayed recognition (so called "sleeping beauties", SBs) or have presented single publications as cases of SBs. Most recently, Ke et al. (2015) proposed the so called "beauty coefficient" (denoted as B) to quantify how much a given paper can be considered as a paper with delayed recognition. In this study, the new term "smart girl" (SG) is suggested to differentiate instant credit or "flashes in the pan" from SBs. While SG and SB are qualitatively defined, the dynamic citation angle \b{eta} is introduced in this study as a simple way for identifying SGs and SBs quantitatively - complementing the beauty coefficient B. The citation angles for all articles from 1980 (n=166870) in natural sciences are calculated for identifying SGs and SBs and their extent. 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 are explained.