Identifying “hot papers” and papers with “delayed recognition” in large-scale datasets by using dynamically normalized citation impact scores

“Hot papers” (HPs) are papers which received a boost of citations shortly after publication. Papers with “delayed recognition” (DRs) received scarcely impact over a long time period, before a considerable citation boost started. DRs have attracted a lot of attention in scientometrics and beyond. Based on a comprehensive dataset with more than 5,000,000 papers published between 1980 and 1990, we identified HPs and DRs. In contrast to many other studies on DRs, which are based on raw citation counts, we calculated dynamically field-normalized impact scores for the search of HPs and DRs. This study is intended to investigate the differences between HPs (n = 323) and DRs (n = 315). The investigation of the journals which have published HPs and DRs revealed that some journals (e.g. Physical Review Letters and PNAS) were able to publish significantly more HPs than other journals. This pattern did not appear in DRs. Many HPs and DRs have been published by authors from the USA; however, in contrast to other countries, authors from the USA have published statistically significantly more HPs than DRs. Whereas “Biochemistry & Molecular Biology,” “Immunology,” and “Cell Biology” have published significantly more HPs than DRs, the opposite result arrived for “Surgery” and “Orthopedics.” The results of the analysis of certain properties of HPs and DRs (e.g. number of pages) suggest that the emergence of DRs is an unpredictable process.