Skip to content

Are few citations a dealbreaker for authorship?

Key answer

There is no fixed threshold. If you file as a researcher, citations matter and get benchmarked against your field's average. For practitioners the community observes the opposite: RFEs almost never attack citation counts of non-academics - the journal's standing, the article's scholarly nature and indexing matter more.
Check a journal or outlet for the petition

Community answers

The answers below are translated from the original Russian - the language of the community chats.

  • Citations should be shown if you are applying as a scholar and submitting for scientific criteria. In RFEs, the number of citations is rarely scrutinized for non-scholars - what matters is the journal, the scientific merit of the article, and indexing.

  • If you include the citation index, you need to explain what the average figure is for researchers in the same field and prove this through public data, not just a couple of examples.

  • The term 'on average' is elastic: some find one or two sufficient, while others think ten is few. There are no specific numbers.

  • There is no strict standard, and much depends on the field: in some disciplines, citations are active, while in others, they are sparse. There are approved cases in the community with an h-index around 8 and about 220 citations, and with an h-index of 13-14 and around 400 citations; some received approval without even mentioning the Hirsch index. For the academic track, citation counts often play a key role, but this is not the only factor.

The answers are anonymized community experience from the public chats, not legal advice. Officers may decide similar cases differently.

Why "Scholarly authorship" gets refused

Accepted in 44% of challenged petitions (86 of 196); not an approval rate.

The venue is not accepted as professional, trade or major media - where it was published is judged separately from the article itself.

All refusal grounds and the sample

Sources

All questions on: Articles and citationsAll questions on: Scientists

Related on this site

Similar questions

A reference page built from community experience, not legal advice. Requirements and practice change - verify on uscis.gov.

Did this answer help?