Any (specific) idea how to get to that data? I might be interested in including this with some other, more general information-flow model{s,ing}. This part seems like making it publicly available would be a good thing, and possibly necessary, and likely aligned with the goals a likely choice of organization to host/maintain the technology would have.

i'm moderately hopeful that we'll get that sort of querying for free* as the semantic web matures, and we can better query federated linked data. university libraries are pretty keen on making that dream a reality (and this is the sort of use-case that makes them want to be able to do that, though they'd probably pitch the rosier version, where they show the indirect impact of a well-regarded paper or study, because that sells better than the doom-n-gloom version described here, even if that version is just as important).

* or if not "free", a very small marginal cost, in terms of say data aggregation and programming effort