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Sleeping Beauties and their princes in innovation studies

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Abstract

A Sleeping Beauty (SB) is a publication that goes unnoticed for a long time, and then, almost suddenly, is awakened by a ‘prince’ (PR), attracting from there on a lot of attention in terms of citations. Although there are some studies on the SB and the PR phenomena in the sciences, barely any research on this topic has been conducted in the social sciences, let alone in innovation studies. Based on 52,373 articles extracted from the Web of Science and using a new method that, comparatively with extant methods, selects SBs with the highest scientific impact, we found that, similarly to the sciences, SBs are rare in the field of innovation (<0.02%). In contrast with the sciences, the depth of sleep is relatively small, ranging from 7 to 17 years. All the 8 SBs found, and the (37) corresponding princes, were published in highly renowned journals (e.g., Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, Research Policy). The explanations for the delayed recognition are associated with innovative methods, scientific resistance, and theoretical-relatedness. The role of highly influential authors and self-awakening mechanisms were critical triggers for bringing SBs into scientific notoriety.

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Notes

  1. Reference date: June 2016.

  2. The article by Li and Ye (2012) mentions SBs’ princes but it does not explicitly identify them.

  3. Peyton Rous was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on cancer virus.

  4. The reference date for extracting the data was October 13th, 2014.

  5. Figure 1 shows that for those papers identified as potential SB according to the van Raan model, on average, the number of citations does not increase over time. Such property is maintained even when the sleeping period is increased from the standard 5 years period.

  6. We replicated every step of the process for all the SBs. In the Appendix we detail the procedure for finding the PRs using Kaplan and Norton (1992), the SB with the highest citation count, as an example.

  7. We use here the last available information from Journal Citation Report, Web of Science 2015.

  8. Work developed from his Ph.D. thesis ("Economic Analysis of Product Innovation: The Case of CT Scanners"), received in 1984 from Harvard University.

  9. Moore’s SB (“Predators and prey: A new ecology of competition”) won the McKinsey Award for best article of the year for 1993. His follow up (1996) book “The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems” was a best-seller and won several awards (“one of the ten best books of the year”, BusinessWeek, and “one of the ten best books of the decade for entrepreneurs”, Wall Street Journal).

  10. The h-index is based on the highest number of papers included that have had at least the same number of citations. It seeks to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a given author (Alonso et al. 2009).

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate helpful comments by two anonymous referees and the editor, Wolfgang Glänzel. This research has been financed by Portuguese Public Funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) in the framework of the project UID/ECO/04105/2013.

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Correspondence to Aurora A. C. Teixeira.

Appendix: Detailing the procedure for finding the PRs

Appendix: Detailing the procedure for finding the PRs

To begin the analysis we extracted the citation pattern of Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b), that is, the list of articles that cite Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b) (see Table 4).

Table 4 Part of the list of articles citing Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b), the SB.

In the first step, the candidate PRs shown in the previous list were reduced by excluding all the papers cited 10 or less times. To keep reducing this list, we had to keep using the citation pattern as a form of measurement.

The next step consisted in repeating the download process but now for articles citing the potential PRs. We were thus able to obtain the data needed to count the co-citations. In the two lists of articles [one with articles citing Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b), and the other with articles citing potential PRs, using in this example Martinsons and Davison (2007)] we counted the items that were simultaneously on both lists, the co-citations (see Table 5).

Table 5 Part of the list of articles citing Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b) or Martinsons and Davison (2007)

The literature defines the PR as an article that cites the SB in the year that the SB begins to be awakened (van Raan 2004). Van Raan (2004) found an extreme case with the longest sleeping period in his research, in which the SB was cited by its first PR after 10 years of dormancy. Therefore, the analysis could be reduced to the year in which the awakening of the SB occurs. However, as a priori we do not have solid information to guarantee that this assumption is always confirmed, we needed to study as potential PRs all the articles citing the SB with some impact in the literature (more than 10 citations since their publication to the present).

With the two lists, the next phase was based on the count of the co-citations. To identify the co-citations we first used Excel to build the data table, and after importing the Excel table to Access, we used an Access query. The Excel table included information regarding all the articles we were going to analyze (the 8 articles identified in Table 6 as potential PRs marked with a yes in the column ‘Potential PR’, plus the SB) considering only 2 columns. In the first column we placed a code that identified the article cited and in the second column we placed the name of the article that cites that article. Considering the year(s) in which the awakening of the SB occurs, we removed those papers with 10 or less co-citations.

Table 6 Potential PRs of Kaplan and Norton (1992a, b)

Taking into consideration the potential PRs with the highest citations and a valid number of co-citations to be considered a PR (more than 10 co-citations), the list of Kaplan and Norton’s (1992a, b) potential PRs was reduced to 3 articles (which are included in Table 3 of the main text).

It is important to note that for SB6: Moore(1993) and, in part, for SB 7: Damanpour et al. (1989), adopting such procedure did not permit to find the proper PRs. Indeed, individually the co-citations between the SB and the candidate PRs were below 10. However, as some of these candidate PRs were published in the same/nearby year, we considered that these formed a ‘PR cluster’ which was able, as a whole, to awake up the SB.

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Teixeira, A.A.C., Vieira, P.C. & Abreu, A.P. Sleeping Beauties and their princes in innovation studies. Scientometrics 110, 541–580 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2186-9

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