Is it possible for a scientific article to lose citations? I have just noticed something very weird, some months ago, I was looking in google scholar an article of Irving Langmuir called &quot;The Vapor Pressure of Metallic Tungsten&quot;, it had 761 citations, some time passed
and I searched the same article again and now it has 744 citations. I don't know if maybe I didn't see the correct number of citations the first time, but that make me question myself, is it even possible for a scientific article to lose cites? does that make sense?
Google Scholar's citation counts are based on the number of citations found by Google's web-crawler. They tend to fluctuate up and down a little. This is usually either because documents such as internal reports or theses disappear from their authors' websites, or because Google's algorithms identify certain documents as duplicates of one another and 'merges' them.