Sleeping beauties and their princes in international business

Abstract The literature on ‘Sleeping Beauties’ (SBs), papers that have been ‘asleep’ for a certain amount of time and that, suddenly, gain a significant amount of attention, is not very extensive, and has analyzed the phenomenon mainly in the Sciences. The present study seeks to find the SBs and their 'Princes’ (first studies citing the SBs that have more citations and more co-citations with the SBs) in the field of International Business (IB). In terms of methodology we resort to a model that involves citation and co-citation analyses applied to a sample of 19419 papers on IB published in journals indexed in Web of Science bibliographic database. Four main findings can be highlighted: 1) SBs are a rare phenomenon in IB as only 8 SBs were found (0.04% of the total papers analyzed); 2) They focused issues related to the process of firm internationalization, international entrepreneurship, global strategies, and performance and risk management; 3) They were published in highly renowned journals, such as Journal of International Business Studies; Journal of Management Studies or Strategic Management Journal; and 4) They slept between 5 and 18 years and were awaked by 22 princes. Differently from what has been stressed in the literature about SBs, most SBs in IB presented more than one ‘awakening time’ and were composed by ‘clusters’ of princes instead of a single prince. The study of SBs is a useful and instructive model in studying the mechanisms of scientific information flow through citations. It highlights that the excessive reliance on articles' current citations might prevent the uncovering of studies that are ahead of their time.