Properties of an index of citation durability of an article

Citation Delay (D) introduced by Wang et al. (2015) is a measure of citation durability of articles reflecting information on the entire citation life-time. The characteristics of the measure and relationships of it to other article characteristics are examined in the six different fields using the citation data over 15 years of the articles published in 2000 in these fields. D distributes normally with good approximation and is not so much dependent on the subject field as the citation count. Although articles with higher D (more lately cited) tend to gain more citations in their life-time, this relationship is not linear but the mean of citations reaches a maximum at a certain value of D. Multiple regression analysis explaining D showed that articles with a higher Price index (i.e. citing more recent references) will receive most of the citations relatively earlier and that there is a weak tendency that articles containing more figures are cited earlier and those containing more tables are cited later. A seemingly contradictory result is found that more highly cited articles tend to have higher citation durability in individual journals while high-impact journals tend to include more articles with lower citation durability in higher proportions.