Properties of an Indicator of Citation Durability of Research Articles

Knowledge about citation durability of articles is less accumulated compared with that about citation count itself. One of the essential reasons for it is thought to be that any quantitative index for measuring citation durability is not established yet. In this chapter, we discuss the citation durability of articles focusing on the properties of an index of citation durability. After presenting a review of the main studies on this subject, we describe the authors’ research investigating a selected indicator of citation durability (“Citation Delay” introduced by Wang et al. [43]) from the viewpoint of its basic properties, relatedness to the long-term citation count, and dependence on other characteristics of articles. In this research we aimed to examine whether there are some general trends across subject fields regarding the properties of the indicator. Finally, we discuss the results of our research by relating to those reported by existing studies.