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Identifying ‘associated-sleeping-beauties’ in ‘swan-groups’ based on small qualified datasets of physics and economics

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Abstract

‘Sleeping beauties’ refer to the papers that received no or scarce citation after appearance, but considerable citations several years later, which is a special citation pattern. Following two new citation models called ‘black–white swans’ and ‘swan-groups’ that described interactional citation phenomena in the key publications of Nobel laureates, we find that there are ‘associated-sleeping-beauties’ in ‘swan-groups’ in the field of physics and economics, which means that the phenomena are established in both science and social science. In practical datasets 1995–2010, there are 12% and 11% ‘associated-sleeping-beauties’ in ‘swan-groups’ of physics and economics, respectively. Moreover, we extend data in discipline of medicine to do further validation, and 2 ‘associated-sleeping-beauties’ are discovered.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants 71673131, and thank Dr. Lutz Bornmann for his useful comments.

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HHZ collected data and processed data and revised the paper, and FYY initiated the idea and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Fred Y. Ye.

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The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Zhang, H.H., Ye, F.Y. Identifying ‘associated-sleeping-beauties’ in ‘swan-groups’ based on small qualified datasets of physics and economics. Scientometrics 122, 1525–1537 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03359-y

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