As to getting cited by others...

From The Scientist:

Tit-for-tat seems to be par for the course in the scientific literature. An analysis of more than 53,000 scientific papers published over the past century in Science reveals that articles with longer reference lists were cited more than manuscripts that listed fewer references. “There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references,” Gregory Webster, the University of Florida psychologist who conducted the research, told Nature. “If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people.”