Google Scholar anomaly (?)

[Ancient Fellow]

Here's a strange one.

I am not terribly impressed by citation-counting as a metric of success, but recognize that some places may ask for that, so once a year I go to Google Scholar and get my citation count and h-index for the master CV, just in case. As I'm in the process with another uni, I did that this year, four days ago. The next day, I attempted to go to the Google search bar (Firefox is my default), was careless in my typing/selection, and wound up back at the Google Scholar profile page. There, I noticed that my citation count had fallen by one citation. I couldn't figure that out, but dismissed it until this morning, where I thought, 'I wonder what was going on with that?' and returned (on purpose this time) to Google Scholar, where I found that the citation count was now back up at its previous level.

Have any of you experienced this? Is this typical? Is there some mechanism that causes a citation to be disallowed? (It isn't filtering out self-cites, either, as it currently lists some of those for me – one of the reasons I am not swayed by cite count or h-index). Is Google Scholar just screwy?

[bio-nonymous]

I first thought that maybe there was a retraction of an earlier paper that cited you and then a new citation came in the next time you logged in, but if the SAME citation disappeared and then reappeared then who knows! Perhaps there was confusion as to whether the citation was supposed to be on your profile or on someone's with a similar name?

[AJ_Katz]

Maybe there should be a confidence interval on these estimations.

Just imagine it...  "Cited 1,500 +/- 10 times!"

[Ruralguy]

I can't offer an explanation, other than to say I've had it happen.

If you have many citations then the difference between many+1  and many -1 isn't going to matter. if you have few citations, then you probably have to work on getting more citations. Unless of course your work place doesn't care about citations at all, and then I'd tell you to find a different worry!

[jerseyjay]

This has happened to me. I don't really know why, but it is always by one or two citations.

I like to check my Google citations to get a sense of who is citing me. At times it has alerted me to new articles that cite me. Some citations included in the total count are more marginal (for example, undergraduate theses) that are cool to know but don't have much importance. I know that there are some articles and books that cite me that do not show up in Google citations.

It is also useful to find sources; I will often look up an article and then see who has cited it.

[Ancient Fellow]

I first thought that maybe there was a retraction of an earlier paper that cited you and then a new citation came in the next time you logged in, but if the SAME citation disappeared and then reappeared then who knows! Perhaps there was confusion as to whether the citation was supposed to be on your profile or on someone's with a similar name?

Good questions, bio-nonymous. I don't know if it was the same citation or another one.

I don't think it could be a retraction of someone's article that cited mine - I'm in the humanities, and while lots of things published in my fields are abysmal failures of scholarship, they're usually failing in the sense of poorly done subjective interpretation of data, not manufacturing of data. Our failures often provoke eye-rolling, but usually not retractions.

[Ancient Fellow]

I know that there are some articles and books that cite me that do not show up in Google citations.

Yes, I've noticed that as well.

[Ancient Fellow]

The issue I had is definitely tangential, but thanks, all, for your thought-provoking responses!