7/16/02
In response to many user comments, the SPIRES team is working on making the citation counts in SPIRES more accurate. First of all let me reiterate the standard disclaimers about these counts. They are gathered from the papers in SPIRES only, we have no way of gathering references from papers outside of our database. They are also subject to many types of errors, from errors in the source paper to errors in the automated parsing of the reference. We also have occasional problems with specific journal citations that have non-standard formats. We also cannot track citations to non-eprinted or published literature. So, as with any source of statistical data, the citation information should be treated with a healthy dose of caution.

That being said, SPIRES manages to index a large portion of the HEP literature, and our citation counts and lists have been and hopefully will continue to be of use to the community. To improve the accuracy of these counts we have, in the past few days, been attempting to eliminate a bug that many users have noticed. There was occasionally a discrepancy between the number of cites listed in the web display, and the number of articles returned when one follows the link. This discrepancy was caused by our occasionally double counting an eprint citation and a citation to the published version in the same paper. These double counts are being eliminated. The net result is that many citation counts will drop slightly, the new, lower version, more accurately reflects the number of citations in our database.

There will continue to be errors in the citations in SPIRES, and one of our best defenses against these errors are you, the users. Please notify us of problems that you may find in the citations. The effort to rectify this problem grew out of several emails from users, so please let us know (library@slac.stanford.edu) of any other problem you find. Also take a look at our page on using LaTeX output of SPIRES to generate references that ensure that SPIRES gets the reference right. You might also wish to browse our help pages for help with other questions.