“睡美人”文献的重要特征、预测线索与政策启示

睡美人文献研究对于图书馆界文献战略保藏、科技界早期识别变革性研究与缩短重大科学发现的认可时滞具有重要意义。通过数据分析和案例研究揭示了睡美人文献具有多出自跨学科研究和综合性期刊、多具有潜在技术与应用属性、多为高质量研究三大特征。初步凝练出预测睡美人文献的若干关键线索：一是识别变革性研究并追踪其技术转化应用状况,包括监测作者是否持续开展该主题的研究,是否从理论研究拓展到实践研究,实践中是否成功等;论文发表之后是否有专利授权,论文是否被专利引用等。二是笔者提出的一个用于识别非高被引论文中睡美人文献的无参数指标--Bcp指数,能够识别出那些正处于“沉睡-唤醒”萌芽期的论文,特别是长期沉睡后初现被引突增苗头,且总被引次数尚未成规模的论文。基于睡美人文献重要特征与预测线索的分析,从加强变革性研究、识别研究前沿和改善学术评价三个方面讨论了睡美人文献研究的政策启示。

Sleeping Beauties in Science: Key characteristics,early identification clues and science policy implications

The study on systematic identification of “Sleeping Beauty” (SB) publications and on their awaking mechanisms will promote the strategic preservation of documents in libraries, and provide implications for identifying potential “ahead of time” discoveries or transformative research, and shortening time lag for original research to get recognized. Based on the data analysis and case studies, this paper figured out some key characteristics of SB publications. The content of SB papers tends to be multi-discipline research and most of which tend to be published in prestigious multidisciplinary journals with higher impact and wider scope. One is perhaps more inclined to believe that SB relate to more fundamental and basic, and less to application-oriented work. But a surprising finding is that half of the SBs are application oriented and significantly more cited in patents than ‘normal’ papers, which demonstrated the potential technical and application-research properties of SB. The key publications and pioneering works of the recent Nobel Prize winners for physiology and medicine are delayed-cited rather early-cited in the entire citation life-time of an article. We further suggested several clues for early identifying SB. First, Transformative research tend to be neglected or resisted by the scientific community initially and this neglect or resistance could be regarded as the key clue for the early prediction of SB literature. Publications belonging to so-called transformative research, even when less frequently cited than others, should be given special attention as early as possible, because they may suddenly attract many citations after a period of sleep. One could identify transformative research through some text terms (such as "disagree", "overcome", "break", "dispute"...). In order to discern such potential transformative research, we could observe whether the relevant documents get early citation from patents or not, because many SB documents tend to be technical research in nature and application-oriented. Second, the Bcp index proposed in our foregoing paper is more sensitive in identifying the “lower level SBs”, which refers to the case when the total citations and the maximum annual citations of SBs are not so high in comparison with other typical SBs. This index may be used to identify the papers at the sleeping-awakening interface, which provided new tools for arousing attention of the science community to previously overlooked but important research. We also pondered some policy implications about the associations of SB publications with transformative research, research front and research evaluation.