Are the number of citations and number of published articles the most important criteria for a tenure promotion?
I've chaired numerous tenure review panels in my department. (These are the panels that evaluate candidates for promotion to tenure and make recommendations to the department executive committee and to the department's tenured faculty.) I don't recall citation counts ever being seriously considered in these panels' discussions. The number of a candidate's publications may come up if it's unusually high or unusually low; the journals in which the papers are published is likely to matter more than the number. But more important than any of these things are experts' opinions of the candidate's work. The experts here can include people in our own department but will also include external reviewers, i.e, researchers at other universities (or occasionally in industry) whom we consider highly qualified to evaluate the candidate's work.