Storyteller: The papers co-citing Sleeping Beauty and Prince before awakening

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 'Storyteller' framework analyzing how co-citations between Sleeping Beauty papers and their Prince papers before citation bursts reveal mechanisms of scientific rediscovery and disruptive knowledge emergence.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method to identify and analyze co-citation patterns that trigger the awakening of Sleeping Beauty papers, enhancing understanding of disruptive scientific discoveries.

Findings

Storyteller papers broaden SB-PR connection understanding

Co-citation patterns can predict SB citation bursts

PR papers often serve as triggers for SB awakening

Abstract

In the Cumulative Advantage(CA) model, which is one of the most fundamental approaches to understand the mechanism of citation dynamics, papers receive citations depending on how much they have been already cited. On the other hand, a substantial effect not included in CA is that some surprising discoveries suddenly acquire citations after a long time from publishing. This phenomenon is known as Sleeping Beauty(SB). Since disrupting discoveries need long-time discussion by the research community to accept, SBs can capture innovative findings and reveal the nature of disruptive scientific knowledge production. To research SBs citation burst mechanism, bibliometricians consider the existence of the Prince(PR) for each SBs, which can be the trigger of SBs awakeness. For example, the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein(GFP), which got Nobel prize in chemistry, had been overlooked for 30 years until Chalfie and Tsien, who also received the prize, developed a method to use GFP as a marker protein in genetic engineering. However, how does Chalfies and Tsiens research relight the hidden knowledge in the research community? If we can clarify such a mechanism rediscovering from nearly nothing, it can be helpful in science support and policy decision-making. This study proposes a Storyteller that focuses on the connection between SB and PR before SB gets citation burst by co-citation. PR is found to be the paper awakening SB in retrospect, but it is not easy to detect it as the trigger of SBs awakeness at the time of PR submission. We named the papers which co-cites SB and PR before the citation burst of SB as Storyteller(ST) and analyze (1) how ST contributes to broadening the novelty of SB&PR connections and (2) how much ST leads the citation burst after awakening.