Fig. 1.

Illustration of the definition of the beauty coefficient B (Eq. 2) and the awakening time $t_a$ (Eq. 3) of a paper. The blue curve represents the number of citations $c_t$ received by the paper at age t (i.e., t represents the number of years since its publication). The black dotted line connecting the points $\left(0,c_0\right)$ and $\left(t_m,c_{t_m}\right)$ is the reference line ${\ell }_t$ (Eq. 1) against which the citation history of the paper is compared. The awakening time $t_a\le t_m$ is defined as the age that maximizes the distance from $\left(t,c_t\right)$ to the line ${\ell }_t$ (Eq. 3), indicated by the red dashed line. The red vertical line marks the awakening time $t_a$ calculated according to Eq. 3. The figure refers to ref. 49.