Why Stellar Research Remains Under the Radar

The pressure to publish may be averting researchers from pursuing out-of-the-box, groundbreaking science

Illustration by Deborah Lee

In 1985, Oxford University diabetes researcher David Matthews published a study in the journal Diabetologia about a computerized mathematical model that could determine blood glucose and insulin levels. For more than two decades, the paper attracted little attention. But something changed in 2008, and in the 11 years since, the paper has been cited more than a thousand times each year, adding up to just under 20,000 citations. That makes Matthews’ study one of the most highly-cited pieces of research published in 1985.

Matthews’ study is what is known as a “sleeping beauty,” a paper that awakens from its dormant state of attracting little to no attention to suddenly become a major body of work. Though the number of such papers was on the increase in medical literature until 1998, they have since remained at a constant level, according to a recent analysis of 230 million citations from seven million papers published between 1980 and 2017. The trend holds true when the authors account for the fact that scholarly literature has exploded in the last few decades, with the global scientific output roughly doubling every nine years.