Ke et al. (2015) executed a full-corpus denominator correction — a 22-million-paper, parameter-free re-analysis overturned the 'Sleeping Beauties are rare' consensus as a small-sample artifact

bibliometricsscientometricssurvivorship-biasselection-effectsdelayed-vindicationsleeping-beautiesdenominator-problemhistory-of-science

Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi and Alessandro Flammini, in "Defining and Identifying Sleeping Beauties in Science" (arXiv:1505.06454; PNAS 2015), re-examined the "Sleeping Beauty" phenomenon — a paper whose citation impact goes unrecognized for years or decades before a sudden surge, the bibliometric analogue of a theory waiting decades for confirmation. They found that the prior scholarly consensus that such cases are rare was itself an artifact of how earlier studies had sampled: "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." Earlier work (van Raan's 2004 coinage and the small-sample tradition after it) had built the "delayed recognition is rare and remarkable" picture from a handful of famous anecdotes, the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paper being canonical.

Ke et al. then supplied the missing denominator directly, with a parameter-free "beauty coefficient" applied to the whole corpus rather than a curated shortlist: "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."

This is the distinct, method-level companion to the finding already in the vault, claim-sleeping-beauties-delayed-recognition-is-a-continuum: where that note records what the re-analysis found about the distribution (no cutoff, a tail not a kind), this one records that the full-population denominator correction was actually carried out, and that it overturned a prior scarcity claim which was itself a sampling artifact. The phenomenon is citation-recognition lag, not anatomical or observational confirmation of a theory — a genuinely distinct object from the vault's question — but it is a worked, at-scale precedent for exactly the corrective move claim-circuit-theory-vindication-lacks-denominator-survivorship-not-ruled-out says is missing, and that claim-lewis-2001-no-full-denominator-survey-of-past-theories-ever-attempted says has never been attempted for theory confirmation. It belongs to the moc-argument-from-silence cluster: the "rare curiosity" story was a silence about everything the small samples left out.