A note of concern and context: On careful use of terminologies

The phenomenon of delayed recognition in science has been studied for decades. Sociologist Stephen Cole proposed the notion of measuring delayed recognition in science using citations (Cole, 1970). Eugene Garfield (1980, p. 488)—the creator of what is now known as the Web of Science—explored this further, suggesting that using citation analysis to identify articles that are discovered or rediscovered “after several years of dormancy” could help historians and sociologists of science to “better understand the process of scientific innovation. ” In this and other early articles on delayed recognition, Mendel is cited as the classic example “where a significant discovery is published and then ignored” (Cole, 1970, p. 303). However, it is not Mendel who became the eponym for this phenomenon, but rather a fairytale princess. Van Raan was the first to label articles with delayed recognition as “sleeping beauties” (van Raan, 2004). In his article, van Raan evokes various facets of the fairy tale: referring to an article with delayed recognition as a sleeping beauty that is dormant until “awakened by a prince. ” The contribution of van Raan’s article is in proposing an “awakening” probability function. Van Raan (2004) obliquely references a prince, but does not develop this metaphor. This task was taken up by Braun et al. (2010), who identify princes as the first citing articles and those that are highly cocited with the original article. Braun et al. (2010, p. 198) discuss the “ideal couple” and how to measure a “lasting, successful citation career. ” They further sexualize the metaphor by discussing male and female dominance and “absolute superiority”: a measurement of the relative citations achieved by the prince and the sleeping beauty. Finally, they introduce the notion of the chastity of the sleeping beauties, in terms of the number of articles that awaken the dormant article. They conclude: “through analogies and metaphorical thinking it may also help to get a deeper insight into the nature of information processes in scientific communication” (p. 200). We disagree. Precision is the cornerstone of scientific discourse. The use of metaphors is complicated by sociocultural factors and may not adequately translate across borders. While metaphors can be useful to explain complex phenomena, they are unnecessary when sufficient terminology exists. For example, Ke et al. (2015) proposed a “beauty coefficient” to measure the degree to which an article has delayed recognition. In describing the “awakening,” the authors focus on the term “discovered”—a far more precise scientific term in this context than “kissed. ” In the context of delayed recognition, the term is self-explanatory. Extensions of the metaphor only serve to complicate, rather than clarify, the phenomenon. The dangers of this practice can be highlighted in the most recent issue of JASIST, which contains two articles referring to sleeping beauties. The article by Mir and Ausloos (2018) is a case study of two articles with delayed recognition—they draw on, but do not extend, the notions of sleeping, waking, and being kissed by a prince. The Ye and Bornmann (2018) article, however, extends the metaphor to add a new label—”smart girls”—to denote articles that receive immediate citations with a rapid decline. The citation phenomenon is not a novel one: Aversa (1985) called such citation trajectories “early rise, rapid decline. ” Costas et al. (2010) referred to articles with these trajectories as “flashes in the pan,” Mingers (2008) called these “shooting stars,” and Baumgartner and Leydesdorff (2014) argued that this trajectory is likely to be characteristic of “transient knowledge claims. ” In Ye and Bornmann (2018), Smart Girls are placed in juxtaposition to Sleeping Beauties, although no explanation or context is provided by the authors. There is no mythological grounding or justification for the use of the term. Rather, the label seems entirely a creation of the authors, building upon the previous sexualization of citation trajectories. As a result, the symbolism now relates VC 2018 ASIS&T