There's no way to manufacture citations directly, and any strategy that promises to should be treated with suspicion — citation-stuffing and self-citation rings are easy to spot and can seriously damage a researcher's reputation. What you can influence is how discoverable, collaborative, and well-targeted your work is, all of which shape how likely it is to be cited naturally over time.
Publish Where Your Audience Actually Reads
A technically strong paper published in a journal your target audience never browses will accumulate citations far more slowly than a comparable paper in a well-indexed, widely-read outlet in your subfield. Before submitting, check where the papers you'd want to cite you were themselves published — that's usually a better signal than a journal's general reputation for where your specific audience is actually looking.
Make Your Work Easy to Find and Cite
Register an ORCID iD and keep it linked to every publication — this alone measurably improves how reliably your papers get attributed to you across different citation databases, which affects how completely your h-index is being calculated in the first place. Deposit preprints where your field allows it, since a paper visible months before formal publication has more time to accumulate early citations. And make sure your affiliation and name are formatted consistently across papers, since name variants and institution changes are one of the most common reasons legitimate citations get missed by automated indexing.
Collaborate Deliberately, Not Just Broadly
Co-authored papers tend to accumulate citations faster than solo-authored ones, partly because each co-author's own network becomes a channel for the paper's visibility, and partly because multi-institutional work often signals broader relevance to reviewers and readers. This isn't a reason to add authors who didn't contribute — but it is a reason to treat finding genuine collaborators, particularly ones whose networks and expertise don't overlap heavily with your own, as part of a long-term citation strategy rather than a separate concern from your h-index.
Write a Discussion Section That Invites Follow-On Work
Papers that clearly flag open questions and future directions tend to get cited by exactly the follow-on studies that would answer them — because those researchers are actively looking for a paper to cite as the reason their own work matters. A discussion section that only summarizes what you found, without pointing toward what's still unresolved, leaves that citation opportunity on the table.
Be Patient About the Timeline
Citations accumulate over years, not months — a strong paper published this year will likely look unremarkable in your h-index for a while before its citation count catches up to its actual quality. Resist the urge to judge a paper's citation performance too early, and resist comparing your h-index against people several years ahead of you in the same field; the comparison mostly measures time elapsed, not work quality.
Track Your Number as It Grows
Since none of these strategies pay off instantly, it helps to check your h-index periodically rather than only under grant or tenure-file pressure. Know Your Faculty's [free H-Index Calculator](/h-index-calculator) makes that a thirty-second check rather than a research project — and syncing your ORCID iD on your Know Your Faculty profile keeps the number current on your profile automatically as your citation counts grow.