5 research outputs found
Twenty-first century macro-trends in the institutional fabric of science: bibliometric monitoring and analysis
Searching for Hot Fields in Science
Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011Dynamics of science is a long-standing research topic in a wide spectrum of domains. In order to analyse the dynamics of science we are working on a methodology to scan bibliographic data from the WoS-database in order to find hot spots and to be able to follow their evolutionary path
The occurrence of 'Sleeping Beauty' publications in medical research: Their scientific impact and technological relevance.
We investigate publications in medical research that have gone unnoticed for a number of years after being published and then suddenly become cited to a significant degree. Such publications are called Sleeping Beauties (SBs). This study focuses on SBs that are cited in patents. We find that the increasing trend of the relative number of SBs comes to an end around 1998. However, still a constant fraction of publications becomes an SB. Many SBs become highly cited publications, they even belong to the top-10 to 20% most cited publications in their field. We measured the scaling of the number of SBs in relation to the sleeping period length, during-sleep citation-intensity, and with awakening citation-intensity. We determined the Grand Sleeping Beauty Equation for these medical SBs which shows that the probability of awakening after a period of deep sleep is becoming rapidly smaller for longer sleeping periods and that the probability for higher awakening intensities decreases extremely rapidly. The exponents of the scaling functions show a time-dependent behavior which suggests a decreasing occurrence of SBs with longer sleeping periods. We demonstrate that the fraction of SBs cited by patents before scientific awakening exponentially increases. This finding shows that the technological time lag is becoming shorter than the sleeping time. Inventor-author self-citations may result in shorter technological time lags, but this effect is small. Finally, we discuss characteristics of an SBs that became one of the highest cited medical papers ever
Do younger Sleeping Beauties prefer a technological prince?
In this paper we investigate
recent Sleeping Beauties cited in patents (SB-SNPRs). We find that the
increasing trend of the relative number of SBs stopped around 1998. Moreover,
we find that the time lag between the publication year of the SB-SNPRs and their
first citation in a patent is becoming shorter in recent years. Our
observations also suggest that, on average, in the more recent years SBs are
awakened increasingly earlier by a ‘technological prince’ rather than by a
‘scientific prince’. These observations suggest that SBs with technological
importance are ‘discovered’ earlier in an application-oriented context. Then,
because of this earlier recognized technological relevance, papers may be cited
also earlier in a scientific context. Thus early recognized technological
relevance may ‘prevent’ papers to become an SB. The scientific impact of
Sleeping Beauties is generally not necessarily related to the technological
importance of the SBs, as far as measured with number and impact of the citing
patents. The analysis of the occurrence of inventor-author relations as well as
the citation years of inventor-author patents suggest that the scientific
awakening of Sleeping Beauties only rarely occurs by inventor-author
self-citation.
Merit, Expertise and Measuremen