  The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well
established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured
several years after it has been published. As research articles are
increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is
downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number
of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is
cited and to how old the article is. This paper analyses how short-term Web
usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive
(arXiv.org) is used to test this.
