The objective of this contribution was to investigate the effects of publication language, topic, open access option, impact factor and others on citation frequency of the author’s articles in Erwerbs-Obstbau since such citation metrics became available, i. e. ca. 2000 citations were extracted from google scholar, ‘reads’ from ResearchGate and downloads from the publisher Springer. Articles in German were read, downloaded and cited as often as those in English; articles on trendy topics (carbon footprint, climate change) were popular over a short period, but not cited more often in the long-term. An article in German on ‘Recent climate change effects on pome fruit phenology’ achieved the greatest citation frequency with 32 citations without open access option.