Google Scholar – How to Create a Citation Alert for a Paper Without Citation

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In theory, creating a citation alert with Google Scholar is easy. Search for the paper, click on the "Cited by X" link just below the result, scroll down and click on "Create alert", and finally confirm by clicking on "Create alert".

However this works only for articles that already have at least one citation. If an article has never been cited, the "Cited by X" link doesn't show up.
This is annoying because as an academic researcher I would like to be alerted when a given article is cited for the first time. Do you know of a way to work around that limitation?

Best Answer

Short version

Replace the pound signs in the following URL with the cluster number of the article of interest https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=create_alert_options&hl=en&alert_params=hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D2005%26cites%3D####################%26scipsc%3D.

Long version

None of the other couple of answers worked for me, so I found a new way of doing this. It involves finding the cluster number of your article, as described by @Calimo in the other answer and then modifying the alert URL of an already created alert.

  1. Click the Save button under a search result that is pointing to the paper of interest (this adds that paper to your library)

  2. Open My Library, click on the article, and then scroll down to find "scholar articles" - that link (but not the one at the top) contains the 20 digit identifier you need. Copy this link and paste in into a text editor. The number after cluster= is the one you want.

  3. Search for an article that you know has citations and click "Cited by".

  4. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page where there is a little mail icon that says "Create alert". Right click and copy this URL and paste it into your text editor.

  5. In the alert URL, replace the number that comes after cites%3D, with the cluster number from your article of interest.

  6. Copy and paste this new URL into your browser and a page will appear asking if you want to create an alert for this article.

While it seems like the final URL always follows the same format, I outlined the entire process in case that URL would change in the future.

Example

Step 2 URL

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=3568708134260123033&btnI=1&hl=en

Step 4 URL

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=create_alert_options&hl=en&alert_params=hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D2005%26cites%3D17056599553763497017%26scipsc%3D

Final Alert URL

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=create_alert_options&hl=en&alert_params=hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D2005%26cites%3D3568708134260123033%26scipsc%3D

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