  A Sleeping Beauty (SB) in science refers to a paper whose importance is not
recognized for several years after publication. Its citation history exhibits a
long hibernation period followed by a sudden spike of popularity. Previous
studies suggest a relative scarcity of SBs. The reliability of this conclusion
is, however, heavily dependent on identification methods based on arbitrary
threshold parameters for sleeping time and number of citations, applied to
small or monodisciplinary bibliographic datasets. Here we present a systematic,
large-scale, and multidisciplinary analysis of the SB phenomenon in science. We
introduce a parameter-free measure that quantifies the extent to which a
specific paper can be considered an SB. We apply our method to 22 million
scientific papers published in all disciplines of natural and social sciences
over a time span longer than a century. Our results reveal that the SB
phenomenon is not exceptional. There is a continuous spectrum of delayed
recognition where both the hibernation period and the awakening intensity are
taken into account. Although many cases of SBs can be identified by looking at
monodisciplinary bibliographic data, the SB phenomenon becomes much more
apparent with the analysis of multidisciplinary datasets, where we can observe
many examples of papers achieving delayed yet exceptional importance in
disciplines different from those where they were originally published. Our
analysis emphasizes a complex feature of citation dynamics that so far has
received little attention, and also provides empirical evidence against the use
of short-term citation metrics in the quantification of scientific impact.
