> Just a comment though: not all citations are equal, so just counting them is quite a crude metric. For instance, a lot of citations in my field (theoretical C

> Just a comment though: not all citations are equal, so just counting them is quite a crude metric. For instance, a lot of citations in my field (theoretical CS) are "attribution citations" that point the reader to the original paper that introduced a concept or proved a result; and these are not the same as citations of work that you actually extend, or to which you compare. And these are not the same as citations of other works that your work is about to disprove: "A recent experiment on mice (Doe et al., 2014) completely failed to take into account the variance of X". There we go, Doe just got one more citation.