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Sleeping beauties in genius work: When were they awakened?
Author(s) -
Li Jiang,
Shi Dongbo
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23380
Subject(s) - genius , period (music) , citation , work (physics) , function (biology) , philosophy , computer science , history , art history , library science , aesthetics , physics , thermodynamics , evolutionary biology , biology
“Genius work,” proposed by A vramescu, refers to scientific articles whose citations grow exponentially in an extended period, for example, over 50 years. Such articles were defined as “sleeping beauties” by v an R aan, who quantitatively studied the phenomenon of delayed recognition. However, the criteria adopted by v an R aan at times are not applicable and may confer recognition prematurely. To revise such deficiencies, this paper proposes two new criteria, which are applicable (but not limited) to exponential citation curves. We searched for genius work among articles of N obel P rize laureates during the period of 1901–2012 on the Web of Science, finding 25 articles of genius work out of 21,438 papers including 10 (by v an R aan's criteria) sleeping beauties and 15 nonsleeping‐beauties. By our new criteria, two findings were obtained through empirical analysis: (a) the awakening periods for genius work depend on the increase rate b in the exponential function, and (b) lower b leads to a longer sleeping period.