Compare methods

	Mendeley Readership Analysis	Sleeping Beauties and Delayed Recognition
Field	Bibliometrics	Bibliometrics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2014	2004
Originator	Ehsan Mohammadi & Mike Thelwall	Anthony F. J. van Raan; Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi & Alessandro Flammini
Type	Altmetric pipeline using reference-manager readership counts	Citation-trajectory pipeline for detecting delayed recognition
Seminal source	Mohammadi, E., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(8), 1627-1638.	van Raan, A. F. J. (2004). Sleeping Beauties in science. Scientometrics, 59(3), 467-472.
Aliases	Reader Count Analysis, Mendeley Reader Metrics, Readership Altmetrics, Reference Manager Bookmarking Analysis	Sleeping Beauty Detection, Delayed Recognition Analysis, Beauty Coefficient, Premature Discovery Detection
Related	3	3
Summary	Mendeley readership analysis uses the number of users who have saved an article to their personal library in the Mendeley reference manager as an indicator of scholarly attention. Ehsan Mohammadi and Mike Thelwall showed in 2014 that these reader counts have broad coverage, correlate moderately with later citations, and, because saving precedes citing, become available much earlier than citation data. Mendeley also exposes coarse demographic categories for its readers, such as students, researchers, and professionals, allowing analysis of who is engaging with research, including non-citing audiences in the social sciences and humanities. As one of the most studied altmetric sources, Mendeley readership offers an early and relatively well-covered signal that complements citations, while raising distinct questions about what saving a paper actually means.	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.