Citation Tracking Software

Many academics rely on the ISI Web of Knowledge to electronically search for statistics about citation counts, which are necessary for publishing performance metrics, and to know where publications are being cited for research purposes.  It’s a great service but it is not available at all universities because of the cost.  If your university doesn’t subscribe to this service you can still get this information from hardcopy publications, but it’s not as easy and efficient as the electronic service.  There is now free software that performs similar functions called Publish or Perish.  It is a Windows application that you have to install on your PC.  It searches Google Scholar for citation information, which will not necessarily give you the same results as ISI Web of Knowledge, although it is supposed to be pretty reliable for the social sciences.  I’ve just started using it and it seems to work well.  I’d be curious to hear from others who have used it.