A curious phenomenon in scientometrics, an area that studies scientific production based on indicators, has reappeared during the pandemic: the “sleeping beauties”, articles that start to receive citations years or decades after they were published. More than a dozen works released between 2003 and 2015 – and which, until then, had had little or no repercussion – “wake up” in the midst of the health crisis, gaining importance in the fight against the new coronavirus. The conclusion is contained in a survey carried out by a pair of researchers from the University of New South Wales, in Australia.
Based on data from the Web of Science, they analyzed the citation rates of 27,460 articles published in the period on various variants of the coronavirus family and respiratory infections in general. They found 15 works with characteristic behavior of papers dormant, that is, that attracted some attention in their first years of publication, but lost strength over time, going unnoticed by the scientific community until they were rediscovered or revisited. On March 9, 2022, when the survey was completed, one of these documents had 3,477 citations, and the average for each of them was 1,090.
Some of the articles that gained visibility from 2020 deal with various aspects related to the mechanism of action of Sars-CoV-1, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars), and remained dormant possibly because the outbreak of this disease, in 2002, it lasted a short time. One of them, published in 2003 in the magazine nature, investigated how Sars-CoV-1 used angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) to infect human cells. Between 2010 and 2019, this work received an average of 33.6 citations per year.
In 2020, there were 1,139 references to paper, which today accumulates just over 3,500 mentions. The results presented in this study led other scientists to assess whether the same mechanism was used by Sars-CoV-2, which was confirmed. This knowledge allowed the academic community to advance in the development of strategies to contain the action of the pathogen.
Other works investigated possible forms of treatment for Sars, as in the case of two articles. The first, published in 2005 in the virology Journal, focused on the potential of the antimalarial drug chloroquine as an inhibitor of the infection caused by Sars-CoV-1. The other, published in 2015 in Journal of Infectious Diseases, scrutinized the specialized literature in search of evidence on the effectiveness of convalescent plasma in people affected by the disease – both strategies were widely tested in patients with Covid-19, but the results were not effective. Also a 2003 article published in The Laryngoscope discussed how to perform a safe tracheostomy in individuals infected with SARS. Another, from 2008, in PLOS ONE evaluated how masks could reduce the incidence of respiratory infections in the population. According to the Web of Science, this work, which received less than 10 citations per year, recorded 95 mentions in 2020 and 89 in 2021.
Cases of dormant articles are not necessarily rare in science, although it is difficult to predict the factors that help to awaken them (to see FAPESP Research No. 256