van Raan Anthony F J
Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 62A, P.O. Box 905, 2300 AX Leiden, The Netherlands.
Scientometrics. 2017;110(3):1123-1156. doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-2215-8. Epub 2017 Feb 4.
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.
“科学界的睡美人”指的是长期未被关注（“沉睡”），而后几乎是突然吸引了大量关注（“被王子唤醒”）的出版物。在我们之前的研究中，我们发现大约一半的“睡美人”是面向应用的，因此是潜在的“睡眠创新”。在本文中，我们研究一个新主题：专利中被引用的“睡美人”。通过这种方式，我们探索发明的“休眠库”的存在。据我们所知，这是此类的首次研究。我们研究“睡美人”发表与首次被专利引用之间的时间间隔。我们发现专利引用可能在“唤醒”之前或之后发生，并且“沉睡”深度，即在沉睡期间的被引用率，并非“睡美人”后来科学或技术影响力的预测指标。一个惊人的发现是，“睡美人”在专利中的被引用次数显著多于“普通”论文。发明人 - 作者自引关系仅在专利中被引用的“睡美人”的一小部分中出现，但其他类型的发明人 - 作者联系出现得更频繁。我们分不同步骤开发一种方法来探索专利中被引用的“睡美人”的认知环境。首先，我们通过测量在“睡美人”沉睡期间及之后与精确界定的主题以及更广泛研究主题相关的论文数量在整个科学文献中的随时间变化的演变，来分析它们是否涉及新主题。其次，我们通过分析首批引用“睡美人”的论文来关注“唤醒”情况。第三，我们为“唤醒”后紧接着的一段时间以及最近时期创建与主题相关论文和引用论文的概念图。最后，我们对“睡美人”的被引用和引用关系进行广泛评估。我们发现可调谐共被引分析是一种强大的工具，可直接发现与“睡美人”相关的“王子”及其他重要的面向应用的工作，例如由发明人在其专利以及科学论文中都引用“睡美人”的作者所撰写的论文。
