A Bibliometric Framework for Identifying &ldquo;Princes&rdquo; Who Wake up the &ldquo;Sleeping Beauty&rdquo; in Challenge-type Scientific Discoveries

Jian Du & Yishan Wu

doi:10.20309/jdis.201605

Journal of Data and Information Science >

2016 , Vol. 1 >Issue 1: 50 - 68

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20309/jdis.201605

Research Paper

A Bibliometric Framework for Identifying “Princes” Who Wake up the “Sleeping Beauty” in Challenge-type Scientific Discoveries

Jian Du & Yishan Wu

Expand

1 School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210032, China;
2 Institute of Medical Information & Library, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing 100005, China;
3 Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development, Beijing 100038, China

Received date: 2015-11-30

Revised date: 2015-12-24

Online published: 2016-01-08

Supported by

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.: 71373252) and the Project from Institute of Medical Information of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (Grant No.: 14R0106).

Fold

Abstract

Purpose: This paper develops and validates a bibliometric framework for identifying the “princes” (PR) who wake up the “sleeping beauty” (SB) in challenge-type scientific discoveries, so as to figure out the awakening mechanisms, and promote potentially valuable but not readily accepted innovative research. (A PR is a research study.)

Design/methodology/approach: We propose that PR candidates must meet the following four criteria: (1) be published near the time when the SB began to attract a lot of citations; (2) be highly cited papers themselves; (3) receive a substantial number of co-citations with the SB; and (4) within the challenge-type discoveries which contradict established theories, the “pulling effect” of the PR on the SB must be strong. We test the usefulness of the bibliometric framework through a case study of a key publication by the 2014 chemistry Nobel laureate Stefan W. Hell, who negated Ernst Abbe's diffraction limit theory, one of the most prominent paradigms in the natural sciences.

Findings: The first-ranked candidate PR article identified by the bibliometric framework is in line with historical facts. An SB may need one or more PRs and even “retinues” to be “awakened.” Documents with potential awakening functionality tend to be published in prestigious multidisciplinary journals with higher impact and wider scope than the journals publishing SBs.

Research limitations: The above framework is only applicable to transformative innovations, and the conclusions are drawn from the analysis of one typical SB and her awakening process. Therefore the generality of our work might be limited.

Practical implications: Publications belonging to so-called transformative research, even when less frequently cited, should be given special attention as early as possible, because they may suddenly attract many citations after a period of sleep, as reflected in our case study. in Challenge-type Scientific Discoveries http://www.jdis.org

Originality/value: The definition of PR(s) as the first paper(s) that cited the SB article (selfciting excluded) has its limitations. Instead, the SB-PR co-citations should be given priority in current environment of scholarly communication. Since the “premature” or “transformative” breakthroughs in the challenge-type SB documents are either beyond the current knowledge domain, or violate established paradigms, people's psychological distance from the SB is larger than that from the PR, which explains why the annual citations of the PR are usually higher than those of the SB, especially prior to or during the SB's citation boom period.

http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/8478

Key words： Citation history; Delayed recognition; Awakening mechanisms; Transformative innovation; Nobel Prize

Cite this article

Jian Du & Yishan Wu . A Bibliometric Framework for Identifying “Princes” Who Wake up the “Sleeping Beauty” in Challenge-type Scientific Discoveries[J]. Journal of Data and Information Science, 2016 , 1(1) : 50 -68 . DOI: 10.20309/jdis.201605

References

Avramescu, A. (1979). Actuality and obsolescence of scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 30(5), 296-303.
Barber, B. (1961). Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery. Science, 134(3479), 596-602.
Betzig, E., Patterson, G. H., Sougrat, R., Lindwasser, O. W., Olenych, S., Bonifacino, J. S., Davidson, M.W., Lippincott-Schwartz, J., & Hess, H. F. (2006). Imaging intracellular fluorescent proteins at nanometer resolution. Science, 313(5793), 1642-1645.
Braun, T., Glänzel, W., & Schubert, A. (2010). On sleeping beauties, princes and other tales of citation distributions. Research Evaluation, 19(3), 195-202.
Burrell, Q. L. (2005). Are “sleeping beauties” to be expected? Scientometrics, 65(3), 381-389.
Campanario, J. M. (2009). Rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries: Accounts by Nobel laureates. Scientometrics, 81(2), 549-565.
Chi, K. R. (2009). Super-resolution microscopy: Breaking the limits. Nature Methods, 6(1), 15-18.
Cole, S. (1970). Professional standing and the reception of scientific discoveries. American Journal of Sociology, 76(2), 286-306.
Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & van Raan, A. F. J. (2010). Is scientific literature subject to a “sell-by-date”? A general methodology to analyze the “durability” of scientific documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 329-339.
Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & van Raan, A. F. J. (2011). The “Mendel syndrome” in science: Durability of scientific literature and its effects on bibliometric analysis of individual scientists. Scientometrics, 89(1), 177-205.
Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & van Raan, A. F. J. (2013). Effects of the durability of scientific literature at the group level: Case study of chemistry research groups in the Netherlands. Research Policy, 42(4), 886-894.
Du, J., & Wu, Y. S. (2015). Defining and identifying the sleeping beauty and her princes in science (in Chinese). Library and Information Service, 59(19), 84-92.
Du, J. & Wu, Y. S. (2015). Identifying “sleeping beauties” and the princes who woke up sleeping beauties in terms of citation speed measures: A case study of the key publications by Stefan W. Hell (in Chinese). Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information, 34(5), 508-521.
Förster, J., Friedman, R. S., & Liberman, N. (2004). Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: Consequences for insight and creative cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 177-189.
Fang, H. (2015). An explanation of resisted discoveries based on construal-level theory. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(1), 41-50.
Florence, A. T. (2015). Cited but not read and read but not cited. International Journal of Pharmaceutics, 492(1-2), 264-265.
Garfield, E. (1970). Would Mendel's work have been ignored if the Science Citation Index was available 100 years ago? Current Contents, 2, 69-70.
Garfield, E. (1980). Premature discovery or delayed recognition-why? Current Contents, 21, 488-493.
Garfield, E. (1989). Delayed recognition in scientific discovery: Citation frequency analysis aids the search for case histories. Current Contents, 23, 3-9.
Garfield, E. (1990). More delayed recognition. Part 2. From inhibin to scanning electron microscopy. Current Contents, 9, 3-9.
Glänzel, W., & Garfield, E. (2004). The myth of delayed recognition. Scientist, 18(11), 8. Glänzel, W., Schlemmer, B., & Thijs, B. (2003). Better late than never? On the chance to become highly cited only beyond the standard bibliometric time horizon. Scientometrics, 58(3), 571-586.
Gorry, P., & Ragouet, P. (2015). Charles Dotter and the birth of interventional radiology: A “sleeping-beauty” with a restless sleep. In Proceedings of ISSI 2015 Istanbul, 15^th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (pp. 266-271). Istanbul, Turkey: Bo?aziçi University Printhouse.
Gustafsson, M. G. L. (2000). Surpassing the lateral resolution limit by a factor of two using structured illumination microscopy. Journal of Microscopy, 198(2), 82-87.
Hell, S. W. (2003). Towards fluorescence nanoscopy. Nature Biotechnology, 21(11), 1347-1355.
Hell, S. W., & Wichmann, J. (1994). Breaking the diffraction resolution limit by stimulatedemission: Stimulated-emission-depletion fluorescence microscopy. Optics Letters, 19(11), 780-782.
Hess, S. T., Girirajan, T. P. K., & Mason, M. D. (2006). Ultra-high resolution imaging by fluorescence photoactivation localization microscopy. Biophysical Journal, 91(11), 4258-4272.
Huang, B., Babcock, H., & Zhuang, X. (2010). Breaking the diffraction barrier: Super-resolution imaging of cells. Cell, 143(7), 1047-1058.
Ke, Q., Ferrara, E., Radicchi, F., & Flammini, A. (2015). Defining and identifying sleeping beauties in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(24), 7426-7431.
Klar, T. A., Jakobs, S., Dyba, M., Egner, A., & Hell, S. W. (2000). Fluorescence microscopy with diffraction resolution barrier broken by stimulated emission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(15), 8206-8210.
Knottnerus, J. A., & Knottnerus, B. J. (2009). Let's make the studies within systematic reviews count. The Lancet, 373(9675), 1605.
Koshland Jr, D. E. (2007). The Cha-Cha-Cha theory of scientific discovery. Science, 317(5839), 761-762.
Kozak, M. (2013). Current science has its “sleeping beauties”. Current Science, 104(9), 1129.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lachance, C., & Larivière, V. (2014). On the citation lifecycle of papers with delayed recognition. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 863-872.
Lange, L. L. (2005). Sleeping beauties in psychology: Comparisons of “hits” and “missed signals” in psychological journals. History of Psychology, 8(2), 194-217.
Li, J. (2014). Citation curves of “all-elements-sleeping-beauties”: “Flash in the pan” first and then “delayed recognition”. Scientometrics, 100(2), 595-601.
Li, J, & Shi, D. B. (2015). Sleeping beauties in genius work: When were they awakened? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(2), 432-440.
Li, J., Shi, D. B., Zhao, S. X., & Ye, F. Y. (2014). A study of the “heartbeat spectra” for “sleeping beauties”. Journal of Informetrics, 8(3), 493-502.
Li, J., & Ye, F. Y. (2012). The phenomenon of all-elements-sleeping-beauties in scientific literature. Scientometrics, 92(3), 795-799.
Li, S., Yu, G., Zhang, X., & Zhang, W. F. (2014). Identifying princes of sleeping beauty - Knowledge mapping in discovering princes. In Proceedings of the 21^st International Conference on Management Science and Engineering (pp. 912-918). Helsinki, Finland, IEEE.
Liberman, N., Trope, Y., McCrea, S. M., & Sherman, S. J. (2007). The effect of level of construal on the temporal distance of activity enactment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(1), 143-149.
Marks, M. S., Marsh, M. C., Schroer, T. A., & Stevens, T. H. (2013). An alarming trend within the biological/biomedical research literature towards the citation of review articles rather than the primary research papers. Traffic, 14(1), 1.
Marx, W. (2014). The Shockley-Queisser paper—A notable example of a scientific sleeping beauty. Annalen der Physik, 526(5-6), A41-A45.
Mazloumian, A., Eom, Y. H., Helbing, D., Lozano, S., & Fortunato, S. (2011). How citation boosts promote scientific paradigm shifts and Nobel Prizes. PLOS One, 6(5).
Ohba, N., & Nakao, K. (2012). Sleeping beauties in ophthalmology. Scientometrics, 93(2), 253-264.
Redner, S. (2005). Citation characteristics from 110 years of Physical Review. Physics Today, 58(6), 49-54.
Rousseau, R. (2007). Cha-cha-cha in informetrics. ISSI Newsletter, 3(3), 43-45.
Rust, M. J., Bates, M., & Zhuang, X. W. (2006). Sub-diffraction-limit imaging by stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM). Nature Methods, 3(10), 793-795.
Stent, G. S. (1972). Prematurity and uniqueness in scientific discovery. Scientific American, 227(6), 84-93.
Sun, J. J., Min, C., & Li, J. (2015). A vector for measuring obsolescence of scientific articles. In Proceedings of ISSI 2015 Istanbul, the 15^th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (pp. 317-327). Istanbul, Turkey: Bo?aziçi University Printhouse. Trapido, D. (2015). How novelty in knowledge earns recognition: The role of consistent identities. Research Policy, 44(8), 1488-1500.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463.
van Calster, B. (2012). It takes time: A remarkable example of delayed recognition. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(11), 2341-2344.
van Raan, A. F. J. (2004). Sleeping beauties in science. Scientometrics, 59(3), 467-472.
van Raan, A. F. J. (2015). Dormitory of physical and engineering sciences: Sleeping beauties may be sleeping innovations. PLOS One, 10(10), e0139786.
Wang, J., Ma , F., Chen, M., & Rao, Y. (2012). Why and how can sleeping beauties be awakened? Electronic Library, 30(1), 5-18.

Options

Outlines

模态框（Modal）标题

Abstract

Cite this article

References