Citation impact

Citation impact is a fancy way of saying how important a research paper is. When someone writes a research paper, they usually get their ideas from things other people have written in the past. To show that they got their ideas from someone else, they put a little note in their paper that says where they got the idea (kind of like giving credit during show and tell). That note is called a citation.

Now, if a lot of other people think that the ideas in the research paper are really good, they might also use it in their own papers and put a citation. This means that the original paper is having an impact on other papers - it's being talked about and used a lot by other researchers.

We can measure how much of an impact a research paper has by counting how many times other papers have cited it. The more times a paper has been cited, the more important it is considered to be in that field of research. This helps researchers understand which papers are really influential and important, and which ones are not as well known.