I often see academics post about realizing large numbers of citations quickly.
I see papers or tips on how to boost your citations - promoting papers on LinkedIn, uploading to SSRN and such.
But the reality, for most of us, is that citations take time to build - particularly if we are doing rigorous work that is part of an ongoing discourse.
When I went up for tenure, I had 181 citations. I thought that number was HUGE and a committee member told me they shared that sentiment - it seemed like a lot.
The member commented that only time will tell if the work stays relevant.
This past week, the second or third paper that I published crosses the 1,000 citation mark after 20 years.
The paper stayed relevant.
So why post this?
Because in a time where an early career scholar could see posts about citations in abundance - to research agenda, literature review papers and so on - it is possible one might feel jealousy or behind.
That’s not the case - it’s just some papers are well-cited quickly and others take time.
Be patient.
Work that makes empirical contributions often takes time to diffuse and be cited in other empirical studies.
Work that makes theoretical contributions requires time for people to digest and weave into their narratives.
Work that makes method contributions may be slow to diffuse - bc people are resistant to change.
If you are doing good work, place it in well-read journals, and contribute to a discourse, your work will accumulate citations.
And more than ‘n’ of citations, that your work collects citations over time suggests that you have had a real impact on understanding of a topic.
Sometimes the turtle does win the race.
Best of luck!
PS. Lessons learned from that first big paper can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eKxGKTZb
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