Awakening Sleeping Beauties from articles on mRNA vaccines against COVID-19

TL;DR

This study identifies and analyzes previously overlooked scientific papers on mRNA vaccines that experienced sudden citation surges during the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the Sleeping Beauty bibliometric phenomenon and its role in technological innovation.

Contribution

It applies the Beauty Coefficient metric to identify Sleeping Beauties related to mRNA vaccines and explores their impact on scientific progress during a global health crisis.

Findings

28 papers exhibited the Sleeping Beauty phenomenon.

Nearly half of the recent impactful papers were published between 2020-2022.

Disruptive innovations often build on neglected prior research.

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak rapidly became a pandemic in the first quarter of 2020, posing an unprecedented threat and challenge to healthcare systems and the public. Governments in nearly every country focused on immunization programs for the general population using mRNA vaccines against this disease, marking the first large-scale use of this technology. Previously overlooked research papers on mRNA vaccine preparation or administration gained prominence. The impact was documented bibliographically through a surge in citations these papers received. These reports exemplify the Sleeping Beauty bibliometric phenomenon, while the articles that triggered this awakening act as the Sweet Prince, leading to the resurgence of the previous papers' bibliometric impact. Here, a backward reference search was performed in the Scopus bibliographic database to identify Sleeping Beauties by applying the Beauty Coefficient metric. A total of 915 original research articles were published in 2020, citing 21,979 referenced papers, including 1,181 focused on mRNA vaccines, with 671 of these being original research reports. By setting a threshold of at least 30 citations received before 2020, 272 papers published between 2005 and 2022 were examined. The finding that nearly half of the papers included were published in scientific journals between 2020 and 2022 is explained by the fact that these works received a significant number of citations as preprints or prepublications. We found that 28 papers from this bibliographic portfolio exhibited a Beauty Coefficient following the Sleeping Beauty bibliometric phenomenon. Our findings reveal that disruptive technological innovations may be built upon previously neglected reports that experienced sharp citation increases, driven by their crucial applicability to worldwide distresses.