| Title |
Sleeping beauties cited in patents: Is there also a dormitory of inventions?
|
|---|---|
| Published in |
Scientometrics, February 2017
|
| DOI | 10.1007/s11192-016-2215-8 |
| Pubmed ID | |
| Authors |
Anthony F. J. van Raan |
| Abstract |
A 'Sleeping Beauty in Science' is a publication that goes unnoticed ('sleeps') for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attracts a lot of attention ('is awakened by a prince'). In our foregoing study we found that roughly half of the Sleeping Beauties are application-oriented and thus are potential Sleeping Innovations. In this paper we investigate a new topic: Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents. In this way we explore the existence of a dormitory of inventions. To our knowledge this is the first study of this kind. We investigate the time lag between publication of the Sleeping Beauty and the first citation by a patent. We find that patent citation may occur before or after the awakening and that the depth of the sleep, i.e., citation rate during the sleeping period, is no predictor for later scientific or technological impact of the Sleeping Beauty. A surprising finding is that Sleeping Beauties are significantly more cited in patents than 'normal' papers. Inventor-author self-citations relations occur only in a small minority of the Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents, but other types of inventor-author links occur more frequently. We develop an approach in different steps to explore the cognitive environment of Sleeping Beauties cited in patents. First, we analyze whether they deal with new topics by measuring the time-dependent evolution in the entire scientific literature of the number of papers related to both the precisely defined topics as well as the broader research theme of the Sleeping Beauty during and after the sleeping time. Second, we focus on the awakening by analyzing the first group of papers that cites the Sleeping Beauty. Third, we create concept maps of the topic-related and the citing papers for a time period immediately following the awakening and for the most recent period. Finally, we make an extensive assessment of the cited and citing relations of the Sleeping Beauty. We find that tunable co-citation analysis is a powerful tool to discover the prince(s) and other important application-oriented work directly related to the Sleeping Beauty, for instance papers written by authors who cite Sleeping Beauties in both the patents of which they are the inventors, as well as in their scientific papers. |
X Demographics
The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 11 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| France | 1 | 9% |
| Taiwan | 1 | 9% |
| Peru | 1 | 9% |
| United Kingdom | 1 | 9% |
| Netherlands | 1 | 9% |
| Unknown | 6 | 55% |
Demographic breakdown
| Type | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Scientists | 5 | 45% |
| Members of the public | 5 | 45% |
| Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 1 | 9% |
Mendeley readers
The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 57 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 1 | 2% |
| Russia | 1 | 2% |
| Unknown | 55 | 96% |
Demographic breakdown
| Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Student > Master | 12 | 21% |
| Student > Ph. D. Student | 12 | 21% |
| Student > Doctoral Student | 6 | 11% |
| Other | 5 | 9% |
| Librarian | 4 | 7% |
| Other | 11 | 19% |
| Unknown | 7 | 12% |
| Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Social Sciences | 17 | 30% |
| Business, Management and Accounting | 9 | 16% |
| Computer Science | 8 | 14% |
| Engineering | 3 | 5% |
| Economics, Econometrics and Finance | 1 | 2% |
| Other | 7 | 12% |
| Unknown | 12 | 21% |
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 7. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 March 2017.
All research outputs
#4,539,392
of 22,950,943 outputs
Outputs from Scientometrics
#873
of 2,689 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#95,236
of 420,768 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Scientometrics
#39
of 85 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,950,943 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 80th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,689 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.7. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 67% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 85 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 54% of its contemporaries.