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Link to original content: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2390-2
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Sleeping beauties in meme diffusion

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Abstract

A sleeping beauty in diffusion indicates that certain information, whether an idea or innovation, will experience a hibernation period before it undergoes a sudden spike of popularity, and this pattern is found widely in the citation history of scientific publications. However, in this study, we demonstrate that the sleeping beauty is an interesting and unexceptional phenomenon in information diffusion; more inspiring is that there exists two consecutive sleeping beauties in the entire lifetime of a meme’s propagation, which suggests that the information, including scientific topics, search queries or Wikipedia entries, which we call memes, will go unnoticed for a period and suddenly attract some attention, and then it falls asleep again and later wakes up with another unexpected popularity peak. Further exploration of this phenomenon shows that the intervals between two wake-ups follow an exponential distributions, both the rising and falling stage lengths, follow power law distributions, and the second wake-up tends to reach its peak in a shorter period of time. In addition, the total volumes of the two wake-ups have positive correlations. Taking these findings into consideration, an upgraded Bass model is presented to well describe the diffusion dynamics of memes on different media. Our results can help understand the common mechanism behind the propagation of different memes and are instructive towards locating the tipping point in marketing or in finding innovative publications in science.

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Notes

  1. https://figshare.com/articles/Meme_popularity_and_diffusion/3187159/1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71501005, 71531001, and 61421003) and the fund of the State Key Lab of Software Development Environment (Grant Nos. SKLSDE-2017ZX-05 and SKLSDE-2015ZX-28). ZJC thanks the support from the research foundation of graduate education and development in Beihang Unversity. We also thank Ms. Xiaoqian Hu for her valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Leihan Zhang & Ke Xu

  2. School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Jichang Zhao

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  1. Leihan Zhang
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  2. Ke Xu
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  3. Jichang Zhao
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Correspondence to Jichang Zhao.

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Zhang, L., Xu, K. & Zhao, J. Sleeping beauties in meme diffusion. Scientometrics 112, 383–402 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2390-2

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