Citation counts alone are not an indication of excellent research
Citation counts should be used with other qualitative measures.
Citation tools are limited
No single tool can provide a comprehensive measurement of research publication impact.
Tools that provide citation metrics, such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, can only gather metrics based on the publications they index.
You should remember that:
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No tool indexes all research publications, and
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Citation metrics from different tools may vary as they index different publications.
Altmetrics
You could consider alternative metrics, or altmetrics, such as the number of times your research outputs are viewed, downloaded, bookmarked, discussed or shared online, for example on social media websites.
Altmetrics may be particularly useful for measuring the impact of grey literature, for example any of your research outputs which have not been published in books or journals, such as posters, patents, preprints, theses, reports or working papers.
More information on altmetrics, click here.