On the citation lifecycle of papers with delayed recognition

Delayed recognition is a concept applied to articles that receive very few to no citations for a certain period of time following publication, before becoming actively cited. To determine whether such a time spent in relative obscurity had an effect on subsequent citation patterns, we selected articles that received no citations before the passage of ten full years since publication, investigated the subsequent yearly citations received over a period of 37 years and compared them with the citations received by a group of papers without such a latency period. Our study finds that papers with delayed recognition do not exhibit the typical early peak, then slow decline in citations, but that the vast majority enter decline immediately after their first – and often only – citation. Middling papers’ citations remain stable over their lifetime, whereas the more highly cited papers, some of which fall into the “sleeping beauty” subtype, show non-stop growth in citations received. Finally, papers published in different disciplines exhibit similar behavior and did not differ significantly

Sleeping beauties in psychology

A ‘Sleeping beauty’ is a term used to describe a research article that has remained relatively uncited for several years and then suddenly blossoms forward. New technology now allows us to detect such articles more easily than before, and sleeping beauties can be found in numerous disciplines. In this article we describe three sleeping beauties that we have found in psychology—Stroop (J Exp Psychol 18:643–662, 1935), Maslow (Psychol Rev 50(4):370–396, 1943), and Simon (Psychol Rev 63(2):129–138, 1956)

Clustering citation histories in the Physical Review

We investigate publications trough their citation histories -- the history events are the citations given to the article by younger publications and the time of the event is the date of publication of the citing article. We propose a methodology, based on spectral clustering, to group citation histories, and the corresponding publications, into communities and apply multinomial logistic regression to provide the revealed communities with semantics in terms of publication features. We study the case of publications from the full Physical Review archive, covering 120 years of physics in all its domains. We discover two clear archetypes of publications -- marathoners and sprinters -- that deviate from the average middle-of-the-roads behaviour, and discuss some publication features, like age of references and type of publication, that are correlated with the membership of a publication into a certain community