You can use citation counts to see how many times a specific article has been cited by others.
Cited reference searching allows you to find articles that have cited previously published research.
Because many databases index each citation listed in a bibliography, it is possible to search the cited references.
You can follow a particular cited reference, or cited author, forward in time to find more current articles that have also cited that author or research.
Searching for cited references is useful to locate current research based on earlier research, see how a particular research topic is being used to support other research, track the history of a research topic, or to track the research of a particular researcher.
However, not all databases support "cited reference searching".
Plum Analytics aims to provide a more comprehensive measure of a researcher's impact by collecting data about usage of citations, data sets, open access publications, presentations, blogs and other types of scholarly communication. These metrics are available at article level and is collected from multiple sources. For more information about Plum Analytics and their 5 categories of metrics, visit their metrics page.