Sleeping beauties in genius work: When were they awakened?

Abstract"Genius work," proposed by Avramescu, refers to scientific articles whose citations grow exponentially in an extended period, for example, over 50 years. Such articles were defined as "sleeping beauties" by van Raan, who quantitatively studied the phenomenon of delayed recognition. However, the criteria adopted by van Raan at times are not applicable and may confer recognition prematurely. To revise such deficiencies, this paper proposes two new criteria, which are applicable but not limited to exponential citation curves. We searched for genius work among articles of Nobel Prize laureates during the period of 1901-2012 on the Web of Science, finding 25 articles of genius work out of 21,438 papers including 10 by van Raan's criteria sleeping beauties and 15 nonsleeping-beauties. By our new criteria, two findings were obtained through empirical analysis: a the awakening periods for genius work depend on the increase rate b in the exponential function, and b lower b leads to a longer sleeping period.