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Is there any way to find out how many times a question has been cited by other questions? Obviously this can be done because when you look at a question you can see linked questions on the right under the heading "Linked", though what I'm after is a simple count rather than a list of questions.

Presumably I'll have to resort to the data explorer, though even then it isn't clear how the list of linked questions has been built. Some of the linked questions have been closed as duplicates, but others appear to just mention the target question somewhere in the text.

I ask because I'm curious as to how effective the various canonical questions I've posted have been, and one obvious measure of this is how often they have been cited.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm confused. Is this not provided by the link see more linked questions… in the Linked sidebar of questions with more links than can be displayed there (e.g. this one)? $\endgroup$ – Emilio Pisanty Mar 22 '16 at 11:56
  • $\begingroup$ @EmilioPisanty: somehow I had managed to miss the More links hyperlink that gives you the list of linked questions and the total number of links. But in any case what I really wanted was a report like the one ACuriousMind found and that tgp2114 has tweaked further. $\endgroup$ – John Rennie Mar 22 '16 at 12:07
  • $\begingroup$ No worries, that was maybe an excess of tongue-in-cheekiness. Now that we're on the subject, though, the converse is Posts by a user ordered by number of links they contain. Not that I'm bringing that up in a comparative spirit or anything 😉. $\endgroup$ – Emilio Pisanty Mar 22 '16 at 12:13
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    $\begingroup$ @EmilioPisanty Your query seems to include all links, not just links to other SE Q&A. Perhaps that was the intention, but I was expecting something that sorted based on number of times a post refers to other posts on the site. Not that I am suggesting changes (if changes were even possible), but I was surprised by the result. $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Mar 22 '16 at 15:26
  • $\begingroup$ And it seems @JohnRennie shared in my expectation/confusion based on his edit to the answer below... $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Mar 22 '16 at 15:27
  • $\begingroup$ @EmilioPisanty If you want to finish off my updated query, I have run out of time on it -- data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/454674/… This will only count links to the site that the query is run on (so if you are looking at physics.SE, it will only count the links to other posts on physics.SE). But -- the DB_NAME(db_id()) should be put into a variable and the parsing statement RIGHT(... should also be stored, rather than repeated. And the magic numbers 14 and 13 should be 8+LEN(storedName) and 7+. $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Mar 22 '16 at 17:52
  • $\begingroup$ @tgpg2114 Indeed the intention on that one was to include all links, though I cannot really remember why that was. (There was some reason, though.) Are you building a version with only in-house links? Yikes, that sounds ugly. $\endgroup$ – Emilio Pisanty Mar 23 '16 at 2:01
  • $\begingroup$ @EmilioPisanty I was trying to build it, but ran out of SQL expertise and the time needed to finish it... maybe somebody can come along and finish it off for me. Although the query works as intended for physics.SE, it doesn't work for other sites (even though I want it to) and it's ugly/repetitive. If I can finish off my other work, I can return to it. $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Mar 23 '16 at 13:00
  • $\begingroup$ @tpg2114 If you're looking for in-site links, it would probably be easiest to use the PostLinks table as in ACuriousMind's query (a small change to this one should do it). But a challenge can also be fun. $\endgroup$ – Emilio Pisanty Mar 23 '16 at 16:21
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The count is available in the upper right corner if you click on the "see more linked questions" below the column of linked questions. If there is no such "see more linked questions" link, then it means the sidebar is already showing all linked questions.

However, this also counts questions that have been linked to from the question or one of its answers or comments.

A quick edit by JR: ACuriousMind managed to find a Data Explorer query that lists questions in order of their number of links. I've done some minor hackery on this and the results are at:

http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/454039

The top question is the book recommendations post. The runner up is, well, modesty forbids me from saying ;-)

And another quick edit to answer the titular question:

http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/454081/order-questions-by-links-for-selected-user

just pop in your user ID number and it will rank your questions in order of most linked.

And not to be outdone Emilio has created a related query to order posts by the number of times they link to other questions. The results are available at:

http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/443461/posts-by-a-user-ordered-by-number-of-links-they-contain

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According to this and other questions on Meta Stack Exchange, you can get to the list of linked questions for a given question by going to

https://[site].stackexchange.com/questions/linked/[question-ID]

This page displays a count at the top right. Example:

example of count of links

The SOUP app transforms the "Linked" header into a link to the page of links, if you want a convenient access.

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