How many citations would you 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).

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