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Waking up science's sleeping beauties (2023)

Many scientific papers receive little attention initially but become highly cited years later. What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?

A 1969 paper by John Clauser and colleagues got one step closer, by framing Bell’s inequalities in a way better suited to real experiments – which followed only in modest numbers in the 1970s, hampered by imperfect equipment: the best technology of the day was unfit to test the theory, such as light polarizers that were too low-efficiency to be reliable. What he had described was what eventually became the statistical workhorse known as principal components analysis(PCA) – which became particularly useful after the advent of digital ‘big data’ to discover patterns and summarize large, unwieldy datasets in a smaller number of variables. The Open Access movement has made important strides in this regard, but it’s a reminder that freely available knowledge could accelerate scientific progress for the mundane reason that more scientists can read it and have it interact with their pre-existing ideas.

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