  The study of the citation histories and ageing of documents are topics that
have been addressed from several perspectives, especially in the analysis of
documents with delayed recognition or sleeping beauties. However, there is no
general methodology that can be extensively applied for different time periods
and/or research fields. In this paper a new methodology for the general
analysis of the ageing and durability of scientific papers is presented. This
methodology classifies documents into three general types: Delayed documents,
which receive the main part of their citations later than normal documents;
Flash in the pans, which receive citations immediately after their publication
but they are not cited in the long term; and Normal documents, documents with a
typical distribution of citations over time. These three types of durability
have been analyzed considering the whole population of documents in the Web of
Science with at least 5 external citations (i.e. not considering
self-citations). Several patterns related to the three types of durability have
been found and the potential for further research of the developed methodology
is discussed.
