There’s actually rather a lot of evidence that citation rates vary according to things like the tiles you choose for your articles, what you put in your abstract, whether or not you are in a discipline where self-citation is acceptable and normal, and whether or not you publish as a member of a team:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/the-handbook/chapter-4-getting-better-cited/

If you want to get a lot of citations, it would appear that your best bet is to write a review of the literature:
http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/beyondpublication/optimizingcitations.asp

Only had time to skim your piece (late for meetings). You say:
“I’ve not done a detailed empirical study, but can draw on two sources of observations.”

We’ve done a study related to your essay. I can send a copy to you/anyone who is interested and doesn’t have access (just email me).

Holden, G., Rosenberg, G., Barker, K., & Onghena, P. (2006). An assessment of the predictive validity of impact factor scores: Implications for academic employment decisions in social work. Research on Social Work Practice, 16, 613-624.

Objective: Bibliometrics is a method of examining scholarly communications. Concerns regarding the use of bibliometrics in general, and the impact factor score (IFS) in particular, have been discussed across disciplines including social work. Although there are frequent mentions in the literature of the IFS as an indicator of the impact or quality of scholars’ work, little empirical work has been published regarding the validity of such use. Method: A proportionate, stratified, random sample, of n = 323 articles was selected from 17 Web of Science listed social work journals published during the 1992 to 1994 period. Results: The relationship between journals’ IFSs and the actual impact of articles published in those journals (predictive validity) was r = .41 (short term) and r = .42 (long term). Conclusion:
The practice of using the IFS as a proxy indicator of article impact merits significant concern as well as further empirical investigation.

This study was done to draw attention to the inappropriate practice of judging the impact of your tenure candidates work, on the basis of the IFS of the journals in which they they had published.

Regards, gary

I agree that the situation is not linear and straightforward – that I am presenting some magic rule that works in all cases. What gets picked up and cited are subject sometimes to luck and to fad and fashions, and citation can also be self-reinforcing (as an author gets cited it pushes people to their other work), and sometimes very worthy and useful pieces get overlooked. Nor am I denying that exclusionary pressures are at work – the most obvious being the dominance of the English language (which I’ve written about if you’re interested — Kitchin, R. (2003) Disrupting and destabilising Anglo-American and English-language hegemony in Geography. Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 42: 17-36. Reprinted in Social and Cultural Geography 6(1): 1-16). However, I do think the general rule I am setting out here works – if you write Level 1 or Level 2 pieces, do not expect to be cited very much. That’s not to say that these pieces are not useful, just that they will not have very much wider impact.

Personally, I think it is self-evident that we continue to need new ideas, theory, ways of making sense of the world as we patently have not created a body of knowledge/theory that adequately explains how the world works. If we did all academics could give up on that front and swap to policy and application. Also, in my view, there is certainly a lot of useful theoretical work to be done in understanding airport security and how it fits into a wider shift in the nature of governance in Western democracies post 9/11.

Rob