How many citations would you need to be considered “highly cited” for EB-2 NIW?
Here’s a post by immigration lawyer Amber Davis on how many citations you’ll need to be considered “highly cited” for EB-2 NIW:
Impact factor is one figure you can look at - if you’ve been published multiple times in a journal that has a high impact factor and your articles were cited more times, that could serve as evidence that you’re “highly cited.”
You can also look at Clarivate InCites or other datasets to get benchmark analytics on citations for journals in a certain industry. With InCites, you’ll be able to see benchmarks for what’s considered a high number of citations for specific fields (which can vary as articles written in some fields may on average get a lot of citations whereas articles in other fields may not on average get a lot of citations). Comparing the number of citations on your published articles to field-specific benchmarks can provide context on whether you have the number of citations required to be considered “highly cited” in your field.
There are also other ways to show that you’re highly cited in your field. For example, some journals and organizations give out badges for highly cited papers, but USCIS will be evaluating these badges in their proper context to see if they do show that you have a relatively high number of citations in your field when compared to others in your field who have published articles.
You can also point to the average impact factor of journal articles in your field and argue that your citation count is much higher than this figure.
USCIS, however, has not provided much guidance on what’s considered a high number of citations, most likely because this number can vary by field (for some fields, it’s normal for articles to get dozens or even hundreds of citations whereas for other fields, an article that gets a few citations may already be considered “highly cited” because the average number of citations that an article in the field gets tends to be low).
-
Interested in EB-1A, EB-2 NIW or O-1? Feel free to reach out to Amber at amber.davis@waypointimmigration.org or via LinkedIn messages.
Interested in profile-building for EB-2 NIW and maximizing your chances of approval? Check out Amber’s course, NIW Ready, which helps those of you who want to build a strong NIW profile in 2-3 months. You’ll also be considered for Amber’s refundable case package, which guarantees a refund of only attorney fees if your case does not get approved. At the end of the course, assuming you do the work, you’ll be ready to file.