"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 et al. (2015) 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. While 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=166870) 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.