sounds like the problem here is the metrics then. which also is something I'm pretty sure only even became a thing extremely recently. For a long time, the only citation-based metric anyone talked about was their Erdos number, which was a tongue-in-cheek thing anyway. Concern over metrics like this is more likely than not going to damage research progress by encouraging gamification. The only "cited by" count I ever concern myself with is for sorting stuff on google scholar, which I never presume is an exact count or directly maps to the sorting I really need.