What’s so wonderful about citations? asks Cambridge professor Peter Murray-Rust. Prof Murray-Rust has looked on Google Scholar for a paper which according to the publisher has more than 100,000 accesses, and found that it has 92 citations over the same period, which translates into one citation for every 1,000 (or so) downloads.

Prof Murray-Rust applied the same logic to himself. He was told by a publisher that his paper had been downloaded 6,000 times, so expected to find about 6 citations on Google Scholar — but in the event found only one. “I’m not saying there are better ways – there probably aren’t”, he writes. “If we make downloads a metric, then people will try to distort them. But let’s not take this [citation analysis] as seriously as we do.”