On Sleeping Beauties, Princes and other tales of citation distributions ...

Abstract

It was demonstrated that the phenomenon of ‘Sleeping Beauties’ in scientific literature is a rather useful and instructive model in studying the mechanisms of scientific information flow. On the basis of the several idiosyncratic behavioral patterns in the citation histories of Sleeping Beauties and Princes a sketchy typology could be drawn. Furthermore, the process of ‘induced citations’ (i.e.citations adopted from the reference list of a subsequent paper) has been studied in detail. It was found that citations, as a rule, are induced by papers published in higher impact factor journals than the original. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.