“Smart girls” versus “sleeping beauties” in the sciences: The identification of instant and delayed recognition by using the citation angle is a research paper published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (2017). On theSindex it has a DataRank of 1.9. It has been cited 43 times, with 39 citing works in its 1-hop citation network.
In recent years, a number of studies have introduced methods for identifying papers with delayed recognition (so called “sleeping beauties,” SBs) or have presented single publications as cases of SBs. Most recently, Ke, Ferrara, Radicchi, and Flammini (, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 112(24), 7426–7431) proposed the so called “beauty coefficient” (denoted as B) to quantify how much a given paper can be considered as a paper with delayed recognition. In this study, the new term smart girl (SG) is suggested to differentiate instant credit or “flashes in the pan” from SBs. Although SG and SB are qualitatively defined, the dynamic citation angle β is introduced in this study as a simple way for identifying SGs and SBs quantitatively — complementing the beauty coefficient B. The citation angles for all articles from 1980 (n = 166,870) in natural sciences are calculated for identifying SGs and SBs and their extent. We reveal that about 3% of the articles are typical SGs and about 0.1% typical SBs. The potential advantages of the citation angle approach are explained.
FAIR checklist signals are shown for context only and do not affect DataRank scoring.
Base Score Contribution
0.568
From this paper's citation signal
Citation Network Contribution
1.3
From 33 citing papers with measurable signal
Ranked by citation count — the same ordering the engine uses when summing log1p(Cq) over citers.
DataRank blends this paper's own citation count with the influence of the papers that cite it. Here, roughly 30% comes from its base citations and 70% from the citation network (33 citing papers contributed measurable signal).
Citers are pulled from OpenAlex sorted by cited_by_count:descand capped per paper, so when the cap binds we keep the highest-signal references and the score is reproducible across reruns.
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