Citation counts alone vs. what I actually used to argue significance

Following up on the community posts here about citation counts not being self-explanatory — wanted to share the specific approach I used, since "provide more context" is good advice but I found the concrete version more useful when I was actually doing it. Rather than just stating a total citation count, I picked out several specific citing works and briefly described what they actually said about my contribution — was it being built upon, used as a foundational method, or compared against as a benchmark. That qualitative layer, even for just a handful of representative examples, did more work in my petition than the raw aggregate number did on its own. I also included field-normalized context where I could find it — how my citation count compared to typical patterns for work of similar age and subfield, since raw citation counts vary enormously between fields and even between subfields, and an unexplained number invites a reviewer to guess at whether it's actually impressive for my specific area.