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Are we talking about regular papers published in journals, conferences and such and not some university internal reports?
Even my (engineering) masters thesis got 10 citations in Google scholar in the first 5 years and it's a common saying here that likely nobody beyond your professor will ever read your masters thesis. Just how pointless are those humanities papers if they get no citations at all?
Yes, published papers specifically. The exact method is explained in the method section of the source:
Also had excluded online data at the time:
Note that this is data from studies published in the early 2000s, i haven't found a more recent analysis, but I find that things that studies/analyses that can put leftist doctrine and ideology into question don't get produced out of the universities and are quite rare. This leads me to assume that analysis would prove the numbers are even worse, as I imagine the Humanities sectors would be incentivized to disprove this statistic to justify their existence in the universities, and the fact that I could not find a detailed analytic reputation from within the last 16 years implies the truth of the scenario.
The quality of the majority of papers being produced is extremely questionable and the methodology has been in question. Back in 2018 three professors deliberately created 20 fake studies with the most outlandish claims, of which "seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected." A similar stunt was performed in 1996, known as the Sokal Hoax. It is a fact that people can submit fake, bullshit papers into the humanities and have them published for the world to see. It's also a fact that nobody is reading these papers.
What was the content of these bullshit studies? Sokal submitted his paper proposing that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. According to the Atlantic article I linked above, one of the published papers from the more recent 2018 example argued that "western astrology" was sexist and imperialist, and that physics departments should study feminist astrology and practice interpretative dance. Another asked if “dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?" Even another argued that "men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are perpetrators of sexual violence." These were the ones that got published into supposedly reputable journals that publish works from professors from distinguished universities like UCLA, Penn State, etc. (There is a section at the bottom of the Atlantic article that provides some criticism/counterargument to what Sokal and the three professors are trying to prove about the state of Academia, for those interested, go look at the article).
The question then is why is this allowed to happen in the humanities? There is the common explanation that one must publish or perish in order to have a successful academic career, which drives people to publish whatever they can to succeed in the Academia rat race.
Jordan Peterson provided another explanation on the humanities papers fiasco.
It seems like Jordan Peterson is arguing the humanities in the universities have either set up or taken advantage of a system that allows financial gain for the professors in the humanities so there is no incentive to publish good studies. It's possible the money generated from this system can be used to justify the existence of these humanities departments to the university. But essentially Jordan Peterson is saying the humanities are a scam.
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