Sleeping Beauties in science

A 'Sleeping Beauty in Science' is a publication that goes unnoticed ('sleeps') for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attracts a lot of attention ('is awakened by a prince'). We here report the -to our knowledge- first extensive measurement of the occurrence of Sleeping Beauties in the science literature. We derived from the measurements an 'awakening' probability function and identified the 'most extreme Sleeping Beauty so far'.