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This question is related to: How to sort search results from SCOPUS or Web of Knowledge by number of citation in a specific field? but a little bit different.

Is there a citation manager that keeps number of citations current for articles that are found in common databases? I have looked at popular ones like Mendeley, ReadCube, and others but haven't seen this feature.

I think that if number of citations was a field in a manager database, it would probably be easily sortable.

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    The citation count is usually not considered in software like this, probably because most people don't really care how often the references they have in there were cited. These software are mostly for keeping track of literature and preparing references for your own papers, where citation count is not so relevant. You could maybe add a custom field (JabRef has that), but I'm not sure it allows numerical sorting on that. Also keeping that up to date would be a pain.
    – silvado
    Jun 22, 2017 at 7:10
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    I think that being able to sort a long list of articles by number of citations can be useful when trying to determine which articles to read. Obviously this is not the only or most important metric, but I think it is nonetheless useful as a good starting point
    – Daniel V
    Jun 23, 2017 at 4:37
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    On several general principles, it is not at all clear that this is a good starting point. It may be a popular or popularly-plausible starting point, but that is a wildly different thing. Still, yes, if you want to know what all the other people who use this criterion have seen, well, right, of course do just this. But this will not at all help prepare you to do better than the myriads who do this "obviously plausible" thing. It's self-defeating, on top of its scholarly and scientific inaccuracy, I fear.
    – paul garrett
    Jul 3, 2017 at 23:06
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    This reminds me of Keynes' comparison of the the stock market to a certain type of beauty contest, in which the most beautiful woman was determined by vote and those who cast their vote for the winner received a price. Of course, for the voters, the game was all about predicting the election, not about who is the most beautiful lady. (However, I'm not an economist, and I'm being told the efficient market hypothesis isn't dead.) Perhaps the same applies to scientific literature - it must be true and instructive (beautiful) if everyone says so.
    – henning
    Dec 17, 2017 at 10:46

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Zotero has a plug-in that will allow you to add a field called 'extra' that contains the number of citations. Keep in mind that the number of citations are taken from google scholar and not from WoS or scopus. But it's a starting point.

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