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Scholarly publishing

Citation count

How many later publications cite a given work, according to whichever index you ask.

Citation counts differ by source because coverage differs: Google Scholar counts theses, preprints, and books and inflates accordingly; Scopus and Web of Science count a curated set and report lower numbers. Neither is wrong — they answer different questions.

A count measures attention, not correctness. Retracted papers accumulate citations, review articles attract more than primary research, and a methods paper can be cited thousands of times by people who never read past the abstract. Highly cited work is worth knowing about; that is different from being right.

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