The point of the exercise is to find papers that are widely considered valuable, especially to other researchers. To do this, they're using citation counts.
There's obviously a number of problems with citations, including self-cites, negative citations ("Alice & Bob '06 shook the community when they found things, but our better, larger study finds no evidence of any effect"), and such. But it makes sense for a company built upon citation rank indexing to rely on such methods =)
The point of the exercise is to find papers that are widely considered valuable, especially to other researchers. To do this, they're using citation counts.
There's obviously a number of problems with citations, including self-cites, negative citations ("Alice & Bob '06 shook the community when they found things, but our better, larger study finds no evidence of any effect"), and such. But it makes sense for a company built upon citation rank indexing to rely on such methods =)