How to determine the merit of an encyclopedia? Scholarly articles and books have citation counts (in for example Google Scholar), as do specific people in citation metrics such as the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Even universities have ranking systems, such as the QS World Rankings. If I wished to familiarize myself with the reference materials in another language efficiently, is there any way of simply searching for the most "cited" or perhaps widely circulated encyclopedias in that language - to hone in quickly on the analogous publication of Encyclopedia Britannica in, for example, German, Chinese or Hindi?

I have considered searching for encyclopedias in a certain language on worldcat.org, but I cannot order the results (so far as I know) by "number of copies held by libraries worldwide". Google Scholar does list the number of citations for an encyclopedia, but I can't get a list of all encyclopedias ordered by citation (so far as I know). Web of Science, so far as I know, does not index encyclopedias.

Is there any way to achieve this?

Thank you.
This might not be what you want hear, but I think this kind of product doesn't exist anymore in any meaningful way. Essentially you are asking what would be a reputable universal encyclopedia (with a grown up target audience) in different languages. 

I checked a large high quality German book store (Kulturkaufhaus Dussmann) and I didn't find a single one matching your query. There are a number of kids general encyclopedia, for different age groups and of different quality and there are a whole bunch of very specialized encyclopedias, from Star Wars to medical but no universal ones for grown ups. 

20 years ago this would have been a good question and there were multiple options in all major languages that could be compared to each other but this is not the case any more.