Assessing the enduring impact of influential papers

This paper investigates citations of influential papers in the marketing and management area. These papers are successful in terms of the direct citations they receive (i.e., primary citations). To be truly influential, however, the papers citing them must in turn be used and cited by subsequent papers (i.e., have secondary citations) to demonstrate their long-run relevance. We propose a measure of enduring impact that takes into account (1) both primary and secondary citations and (2) the number of citations in the bibliography. The measure is non-linearly (exponentially) related to the traditional influence measure (i.e., primary citations to a paper) and captures the dissemination of knowledge from a paper more completely than cumulative or average primary citations.