Compare methods

	Disruption Index (CD-Index)	Sleeping Beauties and Delayed Recognition
Field	Bibliometrics	Bibliometrics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	2004
Originator	Russell J. Funk & Jason Owen-Smith; Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang & James A. Evans	Anthony F. J. van Raan; Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi & Alessandro Flammini
Type	Citation-network pipeline for classifying contributions as disruptive or consolidating	Citation-trajectory pipeline for detecting delayed recognition
Seminal source	Funk, R. J., & Owen-Smith, J. (2017). A Dynamic Network Measure of Technological Change. Management Science, 63(3), 791-817.	van Raan, A. F. J. (2004). Sleeping Beauties in science. Scientometrics, 59(3), 467-472.
Aliases	CD Index, Consolidation-Disruption Index, CD5 Index, Disruptiveness Measure	Sleeping Beauty Detection, Delayed Recognition Analysis, Beauty Coefficient, Premature Discovery Detection
Related	3	3
Summary	The disruption index, or CD index, classifies a scientific paper or patent by how the work that cites it treats the work it built on. Introduced by Russell Funk and Jason Owen-Smith in 2017 as a dynamic network measure of technological change, and popularized for science by Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans in 2019, it asks a simple structural question: when later researchers cite a focal work, do they also keep citing that work's own references, or do they cite the focal work instead of its predecessors? If subsequent work cites the focal item but largely ignores its references, the item has disrupted its field, eclipsing what came before; if subsequent work cites both the item and its references together, the item has consolidated existing knowledge. The index runs from -1 (purely consolidating) to +1 (purely disrupting) and has become a standard tool for measuring whether contributions push science in new directions or deepen established lines.	A Sleeping Beauty is a publication that goes almost unnoticed for many years and then, sometimes decades later, suddenly attracts intense citation attention. Anthony van Raan introduced the metaphor to scientometrics in 2004, reporting the first systematic measurement of how often such delayed-recognition papers occur and deriving an awakening-probability function. Qing Ke and colleagues made the concept operational at scale in 2015 with a parameter-free beauty coefficient that, unlike earlier fixed thresholds, lets any citation trajectory be scored on a continuum of how deeply and how long it slept before awakening. Detecting Sleeping Beauties matters because they show that immediate citation impact is an imperfect proxy for scientific value: some of the most consequential ideas, including foundational work later recognized with prizes, were premature for their time and lay dormant until the field caught up.