Are “Sleeping Beauties” to be expected?

Abstract

A paper that is little cited ('sleeps') for a long period of time and then becomes much cited ('is awakened'), has been termed by van Raan (2004) a 'Sleeping Beauty', or a paper that was 'ahead of its time'. The inference is that the importance of the paper was not initially recognised, only later was it (re)discovered. On the other hand, much theoretical work in informetrics views the citation process as being purely random - modelled by an appropriate stochastic process. From this point of view, the 'awakening' could simply be a matter of chance without necessarily saying anything about the worth of the paper. The question therefore arises as to whether such awakenings can be explained or expected purely by the random nature of the model or whether they are so unlikely that an alternative explanation should be sought. In this note we express the notion of a Sleeping Beauty in terms of a well-known stochastic model and seek to answer this question, at least in general terms.