A paper with delayed recognition (or a "sleeping beauty") is a publication that received very little attention (and got few citations) shortly after publication, but later got much attention and many citations. For example, an 1884 article by Charles Sanders Peirce was rarely cited until about the year 2000, but has since garnered many citations.
The phenomenon has been studied in bibliometrics and scientometrics.
A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded, after looking at over 22 million scientific papers of the prior 100 years, that "sleeping beauties are common", and seen even in the works of the most famous scientists. In particular, that a paper on an aspect of quantum mechanics that was published in 1935 by Einstein, among other luminaries, did not receive widespread attention until 1994. In the top 15 such papers in science, identified in the study, the delay for recognition was often 50 to 100 years.