Rfe (eb1-ea)

B

blueone

Registered Users (C)
Hi Folks,
I received an RFE for my EB1-EA application (self-petition). I am wondering if you can help me with how I should respond to the following points:

1) Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly. artistic, athletic. or business-related contributions of major significance in the field: (While the record indicates that you have made original contributions to the field, it has not been demonstrated that such contributions were of major significance. Therefore, submit objective evidence of the importance of such contributions to the field. Evidence that those outside the alien’s circle of colleagues and acquaintances consider the work important is especially valuable. Claims made in witness letters should be corroborated by documentary evidence.)

2)Evidence of your authorship of scholarly articles in the field, in professional or major trade publications or other major media: (Submit evidence of the impact of your articles and presentations on the field, such as through independent citations or other recognition.)


Problem is that my citations are low- it takes years to build a good citation record in a field that takes at least couple years for others to develop upon what you develop- it's not that hot area.

What do you folks suggest?
 
The citation number is only one of the evidences to prove your significant impact in the field. Even though your citation number may be low, you can still emphasize the quality of the citation: some one had a great study based on your study, appeared in a top one class journal etc.
Other evidences that you could use to confirm your original contribution and authorship are:
1. Independent references (people from outside your network) attest that your contribution is significant to the field, that your study has international acclaim etc. In the support letters they need to specify which result of yours had what kind of impact or recognition and why is that important/significant etc.
2. You got invited to other institutions and/or conferences to present your work. It has to be an invited talk.
3. You were invited to write a paper (e.g. review paper in the field), to review papers for journals/conferences etc. You were selected to evaluate other people's work in the field etc.
4. Quote the detailed discussion (positive) when other people cite your work. This is a solid proof of the significance of your contribution. Usually you could find this kind of discussion from a review paper.

Another thing: you can repeat your evidence for different claims/criteria. For example, you could use the review for journal papers for the claims "Original Contribution", "Judge of other's work" and "Authorship".

For EB1A, the independent references (people from outside your loop) are very important to the success of the petition.
 
Thanks for the detailed reply. What counts independent reference? Do people who met me at conferences and hold technical discussions with me count? It is quite vague.
Any clarification would be great.
Thanks
 
Independent people are for the people outside your loop: no collaboration with you, not your colleagues, not your personal friends, not your advisors/supervisors, not in your department, etc. The bottom line: they know you solely because of your work (while not worked with you). You could meet them in conferences, you could have had discussions with them, but they didn't have joint work with you. They notice you only because they heard your presentation, they read your paper etc. They may invite you to offer talks, they may invite you to review papers for the journals, as long as they don't have joint work with you.
 
blueone said:
Claims made in witness letters should be corroborated by documentary evidence.)

2Submit evidence of the impact of your articles and presentations on the field, such as through independent citations or other recognition.)
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To be honest, it would be real uphill talk to convince the IO with the above questions with less number of citation which would need to for form a foundation along with publications.

You could contact some of the highly reputed scientists/professors and get them the letter mentioning that importance of your work and justifying low citations.
 
blueone said:
Thanks for the detailed reply. What counts independent reference? Do people who met me at conferences and hold technical discussions with me count?
Click to expand...
yes.
any one who had not co-authored with you can be an independent reference.
preferably they should b from some other institution. local prof. may not count as much as outsiders.
any one whom u met in the meetings will be fine.
 
skvadivel said:
To be honest, it would be real uphill talk to convince the IO with the above questions with less number of citation which would need to for form a foundation along with publications.

You could contact some of the highly reputed scientists/professors and get them the letter mentioning that importance of your work and justifying low citations.
Click to expand...

I would like to disagree. Low citations can be due to several reasons. Low citations are inherent in some fields. Some traditional and mature fields have lower number of publications and correspondingly lower citations. Something on nanomaterials would be hot and be cited right away. Also, a significant breakthrough for cancer that was published last month would still have 0-few citations.

I know of scientists who are Fellows of societies - but with low citations. case in point my advisor has ~850 and I have ~250. He has been in the field for over 40 years.

Letters from prominent scientists will be acceptable to judge the impact of the pubs.
 
If you read his RFE clearly, it clearly says "Claims made in witness letters should be corroborated by documentary evidence" How do you support the new contribution without citation or practical applications by some means.
 
If the writer of the letter says that information is useful in his research and is widely used by the community, I believe that is sufficient.
 
Actually I am asking some my references to elaborate on some particular projects and research that they employed my research tools. That is how I am attacking the problem. There are also a low number of researchers in this field that also affects citation as well. Therefore, I am asking my references to include that point in their reference letters.
In other words, I am attacking the problem in a way that shows my research has already been used as a guideline by others in the field. I also have many invited presentations. Therefore, I am elaborating on that as well.
Thanks for the comments folks
Yakup.
 
Also, how do you write about citations in your cover letter? anyone any pointers? I mean if 20 people have cited your work do you include all 20 papers? full articles or only first page? do you talk about it in your cover letter? Any help would be appreciated. llp1 how did you address this issue?
 
nightsman said:
Also, how do you write about citations in your cover letter? anyone any pointers? I mean if 20 people have cited your work do you include all 20 papers? full articles or only first page? do you talk about it in your cover letter? Any help would be appreciated. llp1 how did you address this issue?
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You can just mention that in the running text. "XXXX paper received more than 20 citations". You do not need to write about all the citations list in your cover letter. But include copies of all the papers in the list of citations (appendix).
a general practice is to give all the citation papers (if it is less than 100). The title page, the page where your work is cited and the reference page where your name appears. If you can highlight your name and the cited paper number (4d, 5, 15c etc.) with marker that would be great.
 
so you dont have to state "within quotes' how it was cited in teh paper. Also, if less than 100 provide all 100 papers's first, cited and reference pages? we are talking like 200-300 pages just for this? how big is the application? Man I was going to provide 5 example ones.
 
nightsman said:
so you dont have to state "within quotes' how it was cited in teh paper. Also, if less than 100 provide all 100 papers's first, cited and reference pages? we are talking like 200-300 pages just for this? how big is the application? Man I was going to provide 5 example ones.
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I am not talking about me, but some one here had provided an application form with all the documents which was 1 to 2 inch in thickness.

In fact I am giving all those I mentioned and I have close to 110 citations.
Two of my references who quoted my paper wrote the exact line as it appeared in their paper with in quotes in their letter of support.

Of course my attorney is doing this (that is what their job is).
 
I just printed the "list" of all the citations, and wrote pages no, para where the work has been cited along with the reference.

Title
jounral name, volume, page
(please see, page numberxxxx, paraxxx and referencedxxxx)
 
skvadivel said:
I just printed the "list" of all the citations, and wrote pages no, para where the work has been cited along with the reference.

Title
jounral name, volume, page
(please see, page numberxxxx, paraxxx and referencedxxxx)
Click to expand...
I saw your signature and you had RFE.
In their RFE did they ask about any thing specific to citation or the RFE was different?

since the burden lies on our shoulder to prove, if you just wrote "n" number of citations with out showing the actual paper, how are they going to check?. they do not have access to any of the journals. can you just get away with that?
 
You are not just going mention that you have "n" numberof citations. YOu are going to list all the citations. like title name, journal name, page number, your reference etc....Eventhough they may not have access, if they want to verify, they could pullup one.

Infact, I put each of my article ,number of citatations, followed by citations list. I did the same for all the articlea, mentioning the source too ( scifinder, webof science, etc)


RFE was further proof for international awards and judge of other's works
 
I only provided a list of citations with paper title, journal name, page number etc. Though I did provide the copy of my own papers (the first page of each journal paper), only couple of preprints (selected).

I don't think it is important to provide the copy of the papers that cited your papers in general. They don't have that much of time to check everything. It is not necessary anyhow. However, I believe it is important that you highlight the citations, exactly how and which part of your work got cited by others in a positive way, so to prove the significant impact in the field and the international acclaim. It is important that the people who cited your work provide supporting letter to emphasize and attest your contribution in the field.
A mere citation of your paper doesn't prove the impact of your work. It is the best that your work got cited and their papers appraised your work. I did provide the photo copy of those positive comments by other people: not only they cited my paper, they also reviewed the work and concluded that my method was better than other methods etc. I believe this is more convincing than merely provide tons of copy of other people's papers without any specific positive comments. I realized this when I prepared for my RFE. I didn't do this at the first time though.
 
wow lots of information thank you guys. one question: skvadivel and llp1 - did you just type in a list of citations and para no. award no. etc on like w word document? or did you print if off like scifinder or something and then show it?
 
You can do the both, but the problem, sometimes scifinder wont give you complete result, WOS may have more citations. I created a appendix, each appendix contains each of my article followed by complet list of citations, (along with page number,etc)

As "lip" mentioned, some important citation where my work has been elaboratly discussed, were included in the covering letter.
 
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