Is there an easy way to check for the "expert appeal" of some reference? Is there an easy way to check for the &quot;popularity&quot; (or more particularly, &quot;appealing to experts&quot;) or citations of some reference?
That is, when I find some reference and want to check how &quot;good&quot; it is w/o having to read the thing.
Some confusions:

There can be quality papers with low citation counts. E.g. if the
paper considers an unpopular subfield/subtopic. Or if the topic is not an active research topic at the moment.

A highly citated paper can be false if it's popular due to biases, rather than accurate paper. E.g. some psychological paper that studies something which feeds people's &quot;subjective validation&quot;. That is, people believe a paper is good, because if fits their intentions.
The easiest way is to type the title of the reference into Google Scholar and to look at its citation counts.
There are other databases which calculate the number of citations a document receives, such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Dimensions.