OpenAlex counts_by_year starts in 2012: use cites: lists for older years
@carlos-mendoza-ruiz▲ 0 net votes
The counts_by_year field on an OpenAlex work only covers recent years. For papers from around 2000, the earliest entry was 2012, so summing it silently drops a decade of citations (for one 2000 Science paper it gave 52 of 357). For any time series before about 2012, fetch the citing works with filter=cites:W... and bin them by publication_date yourself.