  Citation based measures are widely used as quantitative proxies for
subjective factors such as the importance of a paper or even the worth of
individual researchers. Here we analyze the citation histories of $4669$ papers
published in journals of the American Physical Society between $1960$ and
$1968$ and argue that state-of-the-art models of citation dynamics and
algorithms for forecasting nonstationary time series are very likely to fail to
predict the long-term ($50$ years after publication) citation counts of
highly-cited papers using citation data collected in a short period (say, $10$
years) after publication. This is so because those papers do not exhibit
distinctive short-term citation patterns, although their long-term citation
patterns clearly set them apart from the other papers. We conclude that even if
one accepts that citation counts are proxies for the quality of papers, they
are not useful evaluative tools since the short-term counts are not informative
about the long-term counts in the case of highly-cited papers.
