An honorary degree, once conferred, becomes a permanent matter of the conferring institution's record. The university publishes the conferral in its degree congregation programme; the citation, often delivered at length on the occasion, is preserved in the relevant university calendar; the record sits in the university's archive indefinitely.

The recipient acquires a post-nominal that they may use formally, informally, or selectively. In most modern conventions, the honorary degree is not used by the recipient in the way an earned one is, but the conferral is mentioned in their published biography, in the obituaries that eventually follow, and in the institutional press coverage of significant events in their later life.

The citation itself is often the most candid published description of the recipient that exists. It says, in the voice of the awarding institution, what the recipient is being recognised for. It will be quoted in subsequent profiles, in tribute publications, and in the official biographical references that depend on such material.

Multiple honorary degrees compound the effect. A career of substantial public engagement, across several institutions, produces a sequence of citations that, taken together, are a small biographical anthology. The anthology is in the public domain, indexed by the search engines, and accessible to anyone enquiring about the recipient.

The work in this category, where there is any, is rarely about the honours themselves but about the secondary publications that depend on them. Citations are sometimes inaccurate, sometimes outdated, sometimes phrased in ways that the recipient would now prefer differently. Considered engagement with the institutions can produce, over time, a more accurate set of references than was originally published.