  Many factors could affect the number of citations to a paper. Citations have
an important role in research policy and in measuring the excellence of
research and researchers. This work is the first study in software engineering
(SE) to assess multiple factors affecting the number of citations to SE papers.
We use (a) negative binomial regression and (b) quantile regression to study
arithmetic mean and median expected citations of a paper. Our dataset includes
all the 25,113 papers which have been published in a set of 16 main SE
journals, between 1970 and 2018. Our results indicate that publication venue,
author team's past citations, paper length, the number of references, and the
recency of references are the most influential factors on the number of
citations to SE papers. From our empirical findings, we present several
implications and advice to researchers for getting higher citations on their
papers, which are in addition to the obvious case of conducting high-quality
technical research, e.g. (1) Aim for high-profile venues, (2) Build a
high-quality author team with highly cited past papers, and (3) Aim for
high-quality work that has comprehensive content (thus longer paper length and
reference list).
