Can we use the number of citations on google scholar (for example) in order to know the importance of a subject in the scientific literature? The results are probably relevant for recent years, but for the years 1970-1980.
If you or your employer have the appropriate subscriptions, you can also try other citation databases like Web of Science or Scopus (and in Mathematics Mathematical Reviews or Zentralblatt Math).
Also, there are very good free specialized databases in (Astro)Physics ADS, INSPIRE in High Energy Physics, DBLP in Computer Science, and PubMed in the life sciences.
All of the above databases have good coverage for older publications.
https://webofknowledge.com/
https://www.scopus.com/
http://www.ams.org/mathscinet
http://zbmath.org
http://labs.adsabs.harvard.edu/adsabs/
http://inspirehep.net
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/
https://www.pubmed.org/
If you or your employer have the appropriate subscriptions, you can also try other citation databases like Web of Science or Scopus (and in Mathematics Mathematical Reviews or Zentralblatt Math).
Also, there are very good free specialized databases in (Astro)Physics ADS, INSPIRE in High Energy Physics, DBLP in Computer Science, and PubMed in the life sciences.
All of the above databases have good coverage for older publications.
https://webofknowledge.com/
https://www.scopus.com/
http://www.ams.org/mathscinet
http://zbmath.org
http://labs.adsabs.harvard.edu/adsabs/
http://inspirehep.net
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/
https://www.pubmed.org/
If you don't have the appropriate subscriptions, you can also try the open data portal SCImago Journal & Country Rank. This portal offers bibliometric information of subject fields by country and journals and works with Scopus data
http://www.scimagojr.com
Maybe Google Scholar is not appropiated to identify older citations (1970-1980), but could be relevant for a recent period. Anyway, it would be interesting to use it to contrast its results with other database results. An important software to analyze citations on Google Scholar is this next one:
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
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