Citation counts are commonly used in academia as a basic attempt to quantify the impact of a publication.

Citation counts are an article level metric.

Citation counts are equal to the total number of times the publication has been cited by other publications.

You can find an article's citation count in a number of places, including Scopus, Web of Science, iCite, and Google Scholar.

Finding an article's citation count in Scopus

1. Go to Scopus
2. Enter the title of the article into the search bar
3. Look for the article in your results list
4. The article's citation count should be displayed to the right of the article, in the "Cited By" column

Note that the citation count will be based only on citing publications indexed in Scopus. Citations from publications that are not indexed in Scopus will not be factored into the article's citation count.

Finding an article's citation count in Web of Science

1. Go to Web of Science
2. Enter the title of the article into the search bar
3. Look for the article in your results list
4. The article's citation count should be displayed to the right of the article, above "Citations" (note: if an article has no citations, there will be no "Citations" label or citation count number)

Note that the citation count will be based only on citing publications indexed in Web of Science. Citations from publications that are not indexed in Web of Science will not be factored into the article's citation count.

Finding an article's citation count in iCite (PubMed)

1. Go to iCite
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click "Launch iCite"
3. Enter the title of the article into the first search bar, or enter the PubMed ID (PMID) into the second search bar (PMID works best!)
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click "Process"
5. If you retrieve more than one result, click the checkmarks to the left of unwanted citations to deselect them
6. Click the "Citations" tab. The citation count will be in the "Total Citations" column

Note that total citation counts in iCite are only available for articles in PubMed. Citation counts in iCite will also only take into account citations from articles in PubMed (i.e., citations from publications that are not in PubMed will not be factored into an article's total citation count).

Additionally note that you can locate citation data via PubMed's "Cited By" feature; however, this citation count is limited, as it is based only on citing publications in PubMed Central (PMC). Citations from publications that are not in PMC will not be factored into the Cited By count. Because of this limitation, we recommend finding PubMed citation counts via iCite instead.

Finding an article's citation count in Google Scholar

1. Go to Google Scholar
2. Enter the title of the article into the search bar
3. Look for the article in your results list
4. The citation count should appear at the bottom of the article result, next to the "Cited by" label (e.g., "Cited by 50") (note: if there are no citations to the article, this option will not be available)

Note that the citation count will be based only on citing publications indexed in Google Scholar. Citations from publications that are not indexed in Google Scholar will not be factored into the article's citation count.

Citation counts have many limitations as a metric. A few limitations include:

• Inconsistent between databases (e.g., an article may have a different citation count in PubMed vs Google Scholar)
• Not all citations are "good" citations (e.g., Article A may cite Article B to reject Article B's findings)
• Does not exclude self citations
• Bias favoring older articles
• Bias favoring well-known institutions and researchers
• Bias favoring controversial topics
• A "good" citation count differs by field
• Does not take into account social impact (e.g., an article trending on Twitter)
• Like all impact metrics, vulnerable to gamification (e.g., excessive self citation)

For a concise overview of citation counts and their limitations, see:

• Citations, articles. Metrics Toolkit. Accessed April 8, 2022. https://www.metrics-toolkit.org/metrics/citations_articles/

For a look into how a retracted article can still have a high citation count, see:

• Suelzer EM, Deal J, Hanus KL, Ruggeri B, Sieracki R, Witkowski E. Assessment of citations of the ertracted article by Wakefield et al with fraudulent claims of an association between vaccination and autism. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(11):e1915552. Published 2019 Nov 1. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.15552.

For a look into how citation counts can be manipulated in Google Scholar, see:

• Delgado López‐Cózar E, Robinson‐García N, Torres‐Salinas D. The Google Scholar experiment: How to index false papers and manipulate bibliometric indicators. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 2014;65(3):446-454.

For a look into self citation, see:

• Van Noorden R, Singh Chawla D. Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database. Nature. 2019;572(7771):578-579. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02479-7.