7.6.4 Argue citations are slow to pick up

This is a generic version of the two specific strategies described above. If you do not have many citations in Google Scholar either and do not have any papers with more than an incidental number of citations, your only choice is probably to explain that citations take a long time to pick up. This is particularly true for the Social Sciences and Humanities, where the publication process is generally more drawn-out with many revisions and even accepted publications can take a long time to finally appear in print.

Taking my own case as an example, my current citation record puts me in the top 1% most cited academics in my field. However, my citations took rather a long time to take off. My first publication appeared in 1995 and by 2000 I had about a dozen publications printed or in press/accepted. However, at the start of 2000 I only had 9 ISI citations (with 20 new citations in 2000 and 27 new citations in 2001). If I had had to make my tenure case after just 5 years I wouldnt have had much to show for in terms of research impact.

You might be able to apply this strategy by doing some analyses for top people in your field and look at their first five years after they published their first article. This strategy is probably most effective when combined with the next strategy.