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I'm using both Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar to keep track of citations to some of my papers. For some papers, I notice that citation counts across these two sites don't match. So, some papers that cite the paper X appear only on Semantic Scholar, or Google Scholar but not on both. What causes this discrepancy?

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    Close voters: Such questions have been kept open in the past. It seems within the scope of the community.
    – Nik
    Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 16:16

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Both have different indexing criteria; sometimes, all cited papers are not accumulated in the system. However, they use a black-box model that is impossible to explain.

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    Moreover, they use different algorithms to harvest reference lists and match references with indexed papers. These algorithms result in numerous errors, and the errors themselves are different.
    – Kimball
    Commented Aug 12, 2021 at 15:17
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    semanticscholar.org/faq#citations - Disclosure: I work on semantic scholar. We have a variety of sources, some open, some are agreements with publishers, some based on document extraction. None of these sources are perfect (not even structured metadata sources!). Once upon a time we tried to estimate total citations in the world based on what we had and what we knew we didn't have. That turned out to confuse users more than help, so now these counts are directly based on what we have available.
    – Jason Dunkelberger
    Commented May 10, 2022 at 22:03

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