http://www.nature.com/news/sleeping-beauty-papers-slumber-for-decades-1.17615
Some scientific studies are popular from the start, garnering multiple citations from other researchers. But others can languish as 'sleeping beauties' for more than a century before awaking to glorious approval, a study finds. Filippo Radicchi, a researcher in complex networks at Indiana University Bloomington, and his colleagues have analysed a set of 22 million scientific papers to identify such beauties — and to find the fairest of them all.
The rate at which papers acquire citations generally declines after an initial period of growth. Previous research shows that the fate of a paper can often be determined based on how many citations it attracts in its first five years.
But some papers lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important. In 2004, bibliometrics expert Anthony van Raan of Leiden University's Centre for Science and Technology Studies in the Netherlands labelled this the ‘sleeping beauty’ phenomenon. Perhaps the most famous example is a 1935 quantum-mechanics paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, which rested unloved for decades.