“Smart girls†versus “sleeping beauties†in the sciences: The identification of instant and delayed recognition by using the citation angle

In recent years, a number of studies have introduced methods for identifying papers with delayed recognition (so called “sleeping beauties,†SBs) or have presented single publications as cases of SBs. Most recently, Ke, Ferrara, Radicchi, and Flammini (, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 112(24), 7426–7431) proposed the so called “beauty coefficient†(denoted as B) to quantify how much a given paper can be considered as a paper with delayed recognition. In this study, the new term smart girl (SG) is suggested to differentiate instant credit or “flashes in the pan†from SBs. Although SG and SB are qualitatively defined, the dynamic citation angle β is introduced in this study as a simple way for identifying SGs and SBs quantitatively — complementing the beauty coefficient B. The citation angles for all articles from 1980 (n = 166,870) in natural sciences are calculated for identifying SGs and SBs and their extent. We reveal that about 3% of the articles are typical SGs and about 0.1% typical SBs. The potential advantages of the citation angle approach are explained.