Sleeping Beauties in Medical Research: Technological Relevance, High Scientific Impact

Abstract: We investigate Sleeping Beauties (SBs) in medical research with a special focus on SBs 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 with sleeping period length, during-sleep citation-intensity, and with awake citation-intensity. We determined the Grand Sleeping Beauty Equation which shows that the probability of awakening after a deep sleep is becoming rapidly smaller for longer sleeping periods and that the probability for higher awakening intensities decreases extremely rapidly. Scaling exponents 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 awakening is exponentially increasing. 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.