Web of Science is my de facto standard for citation statistics (I need these for VR grant applications), and defines the lower limit of citations (it is pretty clean, but I do have to ping them now and then to fix something). The public front-end of it is Researcher ID. There is an Microsoft initiative, which looks clean but doesn’t work on Linux for the nicer things, but the coverage of journals is pretty bad in my field, giving a biased (downwards) H-index. And CiteULike and Mendeley focus more on your publications than on citations (though the former has great CiTO support!).

Then Google Scholar Citations (GSC) shows up. While it does not look as pretty as competing products, it compensates that with a wide coverage of literature (for example, it supports the JChemInf, which Web-of-Science currently does not; and I happen to publish a lot in that journal recently), books, and reports, while keeping false positives fairly low. Thus, it provides an upper limit of my citations statistics, but one I am pretty happy confident about. And my H-index is quite comparable anyway. This is what my profile looks like:

So, these statistics have two purposes to me: 1. grant applications, and 2. I like to know what people based theirs on my research. (Well, OK, 3. it helps me understand why I work so hard on too many things.)

Now the question is, will GSC take off. Will it replace ORCID? Will they join ORCID? Will GSC get a good API? Who will write the first userscript to make the GUI fancier? Will GSC support CiTO? Will GSC start using microformats or RDFa? What mashups can we expect between bibliographic databases? Will new entries automatically be posted to Google+? Will it have a button to autocreate a blog post when a paper gets cited 100, 500, or a 1000 times? Will GSC support #altmetrics?

google  citeulike  10.1186/1471-2105-8-487