I'm trying to make the case for funding at my college's directive board to take an important course in a research tool that requires us to pay for travel and lodging in another town. Even though it's not strictly necessary, I would like to attach a graph or infographic about how this tool has gained in popularity and citations in academia since its inception, but I'm having trouble finding a resource that allows me to create some sort of ranking of the word along research papers in the area. I'm still a grad student and haven't used Google Scholar that much (I get my papers from Arxiv and other sources) so maybe there's some functionality that I'm missing. Simply showing some sort of "this many papers have used the tool or cited related papers" or "this percent of papers use the keyword" would be enough.
(I phrased the question in a general sense so anyone with similar issue can find it, but the tool in this case is gem5, a processor simulation tool, and my area is computer architecture)