“Sleeping beauty” and her restless sleep: Charles Dotter and the birth of interventional radiology

Abstract

Charles Dotter has been described as the father of interventional radiology, a medical specialty born at the interface between radiology and cardiology. Before 1979, it was relatively difficult to find citations to a landmark paper that Dotter had first published in 1964—qualifying this study, from a scientometric perspective, as a sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are texts that suffer due to delayed recognition. The present paper explores the Dotter case study’s bibliometric characteristics while analyzing the Van Raan criteria’s usefulness for defining sleeping beauties in science. Citation network analysis using CitNetExplorer has proven helpful in identifying the “Prince” in this fairy tale. The duration of sleep is viewed here as a period of restlessness marked by science and social controversies that are often documented in publication databases using a wide range of bibliographic references. Hence the idea of introducing alongside this sleeping beauty construct the idea of “restless sleep”. These observations should open new avenues in identifying sleeping beauties while nurturing scientific controversy studies revolving around the use of scientometric approaches.