Sleeping Beauties of Political Science: The Case of AF Bentley

Recognition is what makes science move forward. Yet, late recognition has been an existing phenomenon in the scientific community for centuries. Does this phenomenon of “Sleeping Beauties”, as these works are sometimes called in academic literature, exist in Political Science? The bibliometric analysis we applied showed a positive answer. Our paper is the first case study of “Sleeping Beauty” that is not an article but a book. The book by A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, serves as an example of “Sleeping Beauty” in the Political Science domain. What put this work to “sleep”? And why, at some point, it has been suddenly “awakened” by a large number of citations? Although it has been discussed previously as a neglected classic, no bibliometric analysis has been applied to examine it and assumptions for its neglect and rediscovery presented by previous authors differ from our bibliometric findings.