"Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., richard feynman.
Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time."
Google Scholar is one way to track citations. The searching capabilities of Google Scholar are not as precise as proprietary databases. If you're looking for a particular author, you may need to try a variety of searches.
Examples:
To locate the advanced search, click next to the search button.
To determine which items index by Google Scholar have cited an article, click on Cited by X.
For individual faculty members, we recommend creating and personalizing your own profile. You can make a profile and associate your publications allowing you to make graphs and compute metrics of your impact.
Google Scholar Metrics is designed to help authors "gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications." Towards that goal, Google Scholar Metrics assigns publications a variety of rankings based upon Google's h-index.
H-index is based on h-core, which "is a set of top cited h articles from" a given publication. "The h-median is a measure of the distribution of citations to the h-core articles." Search results display h-index and h-median scores for publications based on the last 5 complete calendar years.
For more information on the methodology and data sources behind the rankings, see Google Scholar Metrics Questions? page.