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Kazuo_Thow comments on A Rational Education - Less Wrong
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But note that being a good researcher does not automatically translate to also being a good teacher. I'd put less emphasis on how many citations they have and more on how good they are at actually teaching.
To find out how good someone is at teaching, you can use a resource like http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ (if you live in the right country, which I don't) or simply ask around.
I've gotten into the habit of pointing out, whenever other students at my university make reference to ratemyprofessors.com, that the selection bias on that site is huge. It's not uncommon to see professors with dozens of extremely positive reviews, dozens more highly negative reviews, and very few - if any - neutral reviews. Naturally, the negative reviews appear most frequently because "grr, I feel like this professor graded too harshly" provides the strongest motivation for posting a disgruntled comment.
I don't know of any other place that does this, but the University of Washington maintains a course evaluation system (with data made available to all students), to gather quarterly feedback on the performance of professors and TAs in such a way that at most ~5% students fail to fill out the questionnaires.
CSUs and UCs do this (or at least where I've been they do); while these evals might be less biased they are more than proportionately less accessible.
Also ratemyprofessors.com has different ratings for "easiness" "enthusiasm" etc., so instead of looking at "highest rated" professors looking at the actual reviews would be a bit more informative.
How so?
Compared with ratemyprofessors, which is available to everyone online, I don't think the evaluations written by students (at least in California) are publicly available at all. I could be wrong, but I don't know anyone who has ever seen one (other than the person being evaluated).