I have two articles in print, one at a top subfield journal, the other at a slightly lower-ranked outlet (but still well-known and respected).
One paper has been out for about a year, and the other for about three years, but I've only received one single citation for either of them in that time.
Did I choose topics that no one cares about? Or is this more due to my failure to promote my findings or something like that?
There is no simple formula for citation success. It depends on whether other people are working on related topics and whether they see your work as helping them with theirs. Remember that if it takes someone else five years to publish a paper then you won't see their citations for five years. If your papers are out only three years, that's not very long. Be patient.
Also, keep working. There are always new opportunities to strike a chord.
This is where conferences come in. Getting yourself known to others in the topic area will mean your name will come to mind when they think about people working on your topic.
Social media can help. People are shameless begging for citations there, and it seems to work.
True story: In my subfield, there was an assistant professor who promised $10 per citation to other junior scholars in our subfield.
Yes, this person actually paid up. No, I'm not going to name names because I was one of the people who accepted payment. And yes, the person got tenure, perhaps slightly aided by a bump in citation counts.
You're conducting uninteresting, irrelevant research. The key to getting cited is to conduct interesting, relevant research. (Or, alternatively, research that's obviously wrong in some way people are eager to knock down, but that only works after you've already established some baseline of interestingness/relevance such that people notice you being wrong.)
True story: In my subfield, there was an assistant professor who promised $10 per citation to other junior scholars in our subfield.
Yes, this person actually paid up. No, I'm not going to name names because I was one of the people who accepted payment. And yes, the person got tenure, perhaps slightly aided by a bump in citation counts.
Sounds like a pretty cheap price if only $10 dollars per cite. Someone with a GS cite count of around 250-500 is pretty unlikely to get denied tenure anywhere except a top department. At $10 per cite, that's only $2.5k to $5k, which is a tiny fraction of your annual salary.
so much of this is being a cool kid in hs again. really. if you're one of the cool kids people cite you. if you're not they don't and its really arbitrary who is "in".
Except the fact that 95% of people in political science were never the cool kids.
i didn't say that. i just said that social dynamics similar to what occur in high schools occur in our field too. there are absolutely cliques of the "cool kids" among the younger generation of scholars in each subfield and they do get cited more. they're not necessarily people who were "cool" at 16.