The ability to manage references to papers is an extremely useful tool for academics. As I see it, the tools divide into two classes: one for managing references while writing, and the other for managing references (often your own) for bibliographic purposes such as putting together your CV. Tools such as EndNote and Mendeley are designed to manage a database of references that can be embedded in documents (such as MS Word) without the need to re-enter all the metadata. The tools work, but are brittle and prone to corrupting the manuscript.

Recently, a number of tools (often based on Google Scholar as the search/data mining engine) have been released. I reviewed CitationTracker earlier, and now got around to looking at Scholarometer.

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Impact of academic research is often measured through citation counts. Arguably, this is a more sensitive measure than just the number of publications, or even the number of publications in prestigious journals. Innovative work often gets published in venues with mixed reputations because prestigious journals and conferences may reject ideas that don’t fit well with the orthodoxy the discipline. In its heyday, for example, the ACM Hypertext Conference rejected Tim Berners-Lee’s paper on the World Wide Web because (among perhaps other reasons) that work contracted then-established standards of what makes interesting Hypertext research.

Thus it is useful to measure the citation counts of papers to understand their impact on the field. Traditionally, this has been the purview of librarians and citation indexes, but the proliferation of publication venues, and the desire to recognize work that was not published in the mainstream (or perhaps not officially published at all, as Daniel Lemire points out) makes the task of collation difficult.

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