Citation tracking allows you to find out how many times an article has been used as a reference in other articles. Overall, one assumption that can be made is that articles of better quality will be cited more.
This is definitely not a perfect system. The citation numbers can be impacted by articles that are critical of the content, review articles, disproportionate citations that are not related to the quality of the content, and high quality articles can be cited not at all.
Not every database has a citation tracking feature.
You can forward track an article citation by seeing who has cited the article since it was published.
You can back track by looking at the references within the article to see who the current article based their research on.
There are a few reasons:
In Web of Science you can search by author, title, topic etc. Once you run a search you can find the citations of an article in Web of Science here:
You can run a search or for a specific article in Google Scholar. Once you run a search you can find the citations of an article in Google Scholar here: