与“睡美人”的被引曲线相反，“昙花一现”这一类论文一经发表立即被大量引用，但持续时间很短，之后逐渐被人遗忘。“昙花一现”反映的是科研领域的快速更迭；“睡美人”反映的是科研成果中迟到的认可。二者存在的概率均较低。“昙花一现”出现的原因有很种，例如：一个科学热点被另一个科学热点所取代，一个热点研究问题得到解决，一项解决方案被另一项更优的解决方案所取代……。总而言之，这些现象更符合自然科学领域的研究特征，因此，在自然科学领域出现的概率远高于社会科学。

       另有一类被引曲线极为独特，在图形上看（参见附图），论文发表之后的一段时间内前期符合“昙花一现”，后期符合“睡美人”。也就是说，一项研究成果发表之初立即引发大量关注，成为热点，此后若干年里被人遗忘，但不久之后，它的价值又一次被人发现，因此引发了第二波大量关注，第二次成为热点。这种现象出现的概率更低。我们在1900－2012年所有诺贝尔科学奖获得者发表并被Web of Science收录的12862篇论文中找到了两个案例，并将这种现象写成了一篇论文，发表在Scientometrics（SSCI收录）http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-013-1217-z  。论文中还详细讨论了如何睡美人与王子的happy ending。

附论文标题与摘要

       Citation Curves of "All-elements-sleeping-beauties":“Flash in the Pan” first and then “DelayedRecognition”

       Abstract

“Delayed recognition” refers to the phenomenon where papers did notachieve any sort of recognition until some years after their originalpublication. A paper with delayed recognition was termed a “sleeping beauty”: aprincess sleeps (goes unnoticed) for a long time and then, almost suddenly, isawakened (receives a lot of citations) by a prince (another article). There area sleeping period and an awakening period in the definition of a “sleepingbeauty”. Apart from and prior to the two periods, an awaking period was found incitation curves of some publications, “sleeping beauties” was hence expanded to“all-elements-sleeping-beauties”. The opposite effect of “delayed recognition”was described as “flash in the pan”: documents that were noticed immediately afterpublication but did not seem to have a lasting impact. In this work, we brieflydiscussed the citation curves of two remarkable “all-elements-sleeping-beauties”.We found they appeared “flash in the pan” first and then “delayed recognition”.We also found happy endings of sleeping beauties and princes, and hence suggestthe citation curve of an “all-elements-sleeping-beauty” include an awakingperiod, a sleeping period, an awakening period and a happy ending.

附图（详解参见原文）

       ********本文转自科学网李江博文。其实，令人惭愧的是，现在我们大多数人的论文即不是睡美人，也不是昙花一现，而是一直沉睡在湖底，因为质量太差！