Analysis ranks “sleeping beauty” academic papers

Nature : The first five years after an academic paper is published is a good predictive measure of how influential the paper will be, with most papers’ rate of citation slowing over time. However, some papers may wait many years before their importance is recognized and they have sudden spikes in their citation rate. In 2004, papers that fit that behavior were dubbed “sleeping beauties” by Anthony van Raan of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Now Filippo Radicchi of Indiana University Bloomington and his colleagues have analyzed the citation pattern of 22 million papers to rate their “beauty.” A paper with a linear citation rate of one per year has a beauty coefficient B of 0. The top paper has a score of B = 11 600. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s famous paper “Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete? ” is the 14th most beautiful.