Here is an excerpt from Supercrunchers, in which the author (a lawyer) discussed what makes an article more likely to be cited by other authors:
As a law professor, my primary publishing job is to write law review articles. I don’t get paid for them, but a central measure of an article’s success is the number of times the articles have been cited by other professors. So with the help of a full-time number-crunching assistant named Fred Vars, I went out and analyzed what caused a law review article to be cited more or less. Fred and I collected citation information on all the articles published for fifteen years in the top three law reviews. Our central statistical formula had more than fifty variables. Like Epagogix [a group that created an algorithm intended to predict whether a movie will be successful based on characteristics of its script], Fred and I found that seemingly incongruous things mattered a lot. Articles with shorter titles and fewer footnotes were cited significantly more, whereas articles that included an equation or an appendix were cited a lot less. Longer articles were cited more, but the regression formula predicted that citations per page peak for articles that were a whopping fifty-three pages long….
Law review editors who want to maximize their citation rates should also avoid publishing criminal and labor law articles, and focus instead on constitutional law.