Awakening Sleeping Beauties from articles on mRNA vaccines against COVID-19
For bibliometric researchers, this work demonstrates how disruptive technologies can emerge from previously overlooked research, but the findings are incremental as they apply existing bibliometric methods to a new case study.
The study identified 28 'Sleeping Beauty' papers on mRNA vaccines that received a surge in citations during the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly half of the analyzed papers published between 2020-2022 gaining citations as preprints.
The COVID-19 outbreak rapidly became a pandemic in the first quarter of 2020, posing an unprecedented threat and challenge to healthcare systems and the public. Governments in nearly every country focused on immunization programs for the general population using mRNA vaccines against this disease, marking the first large-scale use of this technology. Previously overlooked research papers on mRNA vaccine preparation or administration gained prominence. The impact was documented bibliographically through a surge in citations these papers received. These reports exemplify the Sleeping Beauty bibliometric phenomenon, while the articles that triggered this awakening act as the Sweet Prince, leading to the resurgence of the previous papers' bibliometric impact. Here, a backward reference search was performed in the Scopus bibliographic database to identify Sleeping Beauties by applying the Beauty Coefficient metric. A total of 915 original research articles were published in 2020, citing 21,979 referenced papers, including 1,181 focused on mRNA vaccines, with 671 of these being original research reports. By setting a threshold of at least 30 citations received before 2020, 272 papers published between 2005 and 2022 were examined. The finding that nearly half of the papers included were published in scientific journals between 2020 and 2022 is explained by the fact that these works received a significant number of citations as preprints or prepublications. We found that 28 papers from this bibliographic portfolio exhibited a Beauty Coefficient following the Sleeping Beauty bibliometric phenomenon. Our findings reveal that disruptive technological innovations may be built upon previously neglected reports that experienced sharp citation increases, driven by their crucial applicability to worldwide distresses.