How good is a given article? How important is it? What is its impact on the field? Many people address these qualitative questions by instead asking a quantitative one: “How many times has the article been cited by other articles?” 

However, these questions are not equivalent. Citations from one article to another are not necessarily endorsements. Yes, an author might cite an article to indicate appreciation for it or to amplify it. But they might also cite a work to dispute some aspect of it or highlight its limitations. And many citations are neither supportive nor contradictory but merely pointers to context or related work. Thus, citation counts are not reliable indicators of article quality or importance.

Also, citational practices differ across disciplines. For example, it’s common to see a biology article that points in passing to hundreds of articles about similar experiments, and it’s common to see a philosophy article that cites just a few other texts but engages with them deeply. As a result, citation counts look very different in biology and philosophy, and it’s important not to judge an article from one field based on the trends of another field. Also, some articles may be relevant to broad areas of study and easily garner citations, while others may address a highly specialized, smaller discipline, resulting in fewer chances to be cited. 

Further, deeply flawed articles sometimes have “good” citation counts — i.e., numbers that on the surface suggest significant impact on the field and wide embrace by other authors. A controversial, debunked, or even retracted article might garner a lot of citations as other authors endeavor to poke holes in it.

Still, citation counts can provide some information about an article’s impact, good or bad. You can find citation counts in several places, including:

• Google Scholar (free to use)
• OpenAlex (free to use)
• Web of Science (available via GC library)
• Scopus (not available via GC library; available at some other CUNY libraries)

It’s very common for numbers to differ across these tools, which all have different knowledgebases. It’s not that one number is wrong and another is right. Rather, each tool provides the citation count that is true based on the information in its knowledgebase.

Icon credit: Count by Adrien Coquet from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)