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Systematic Methodology for Excavating Sleeping Beauty Publications and Their Princes from Medical and Biological Engineering Studies

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Abstract

From 2010 to 2014, the Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering (JMBE) published more than twice as many articles as it did during the previous 5-year period. This increase has raised significant information management and retrieval issues related to the emergence of “big data”. Generally speaking, every publication has academic value and should be available to researchers. However, statistical assessments indicate that 95 % of studies are not cited by other publications. Some of these dormant articles could make significant contributions to medical and biological engineering research. Such studies are referred to as “sleeping beauties”. The present study develops an information “awakening” framework to explain how to extract value from sleeping beauties. The proposed framework implements a web-based system through which researchers can propose effective awakening strategies, referred to as “princes”. An analysis of experimental results found 14 sleeping beauties in JMBE, some of which were awakened by the two proposed princes, namely “keyword prince” and “H-index prince”. The results are expected to provide journals with a clear way to promote published studies, and to make their findings more readily available to scholars.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China, Taiwan, under grants MOST 103-2511-S-025-001-MY3 and MOST 104-2511-S-025-002-MY3. The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of graduate student Jyun-You Lin, who assisted with the experiment planning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 404, Taiwan, ROC

    Tien-Chi Huang & Chieh Hsu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 404, Taiwan, ROC

    Zih-Jin Ciou

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  1. Tien-Chi Huang
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Correspondence to Tien-Chi Huang.

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Huang, TC., Hsu, C. & Ciou, ZJ. Systematic Methodology for Excavating Sleeping Beauty Publications and Their Princes from Medical and Biological Engineering Studies. J. Med. Biol. Eng. 35, 749–758 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-015-0091-y

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