Zitationscount

Zitationscount is a bibliometric indicator that quantifies how often a scholarly work has been cited by other publications. It serves as a rough proxy for scholarly visibility and influence and is commonly displayed on publication pages, author profiles, and institution dashboards. The term can refer to the count produced by a specific database or to the general idea of counting citations across sources.

Calculation and sources: Citation counts derive from indexing databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, Dimensions, and Crossref. Each source has its own coverage rules, leading to differences in counts for the same item. Some platforms also report author-specific counts or allow filtering by document type, year, or language.

Limitations: Citation counts are affected by field, publication year, and language. They can include or exclude self-citations, and may be inflated by practices such as excessive self-citation or cluster referencing. Counts do not measure quality, methodological rigor, or societal impact, and comparisons across fields should use normalization.

Applications: Researchers and institutions use Zitationscounts in performance assessment, funding decisions, and rankings. Normalized or contextualized indicators, such as field- and year-adjusted counts, are preferred in evaluative settings. The metric is often one component among several metrics, including altmetrics and peer review.

Terminology and related concepts: The idea of a citation count is closely linked to related indicators like the h-index, i10-index, or total citations. Different platforms may label the metric differently, and users should specify the data source to interpret a Zitationscount accurately.