7.6.2 Compare your articles with articles published in the same year

Second, if you dont have many citations in Google Scholar either, but have one or two articles with more than an incidental number of citations, try to compare these articles with other articles in the same journal that year. This is a defensive version of the same strategy as recommended above for your star articles. Even if your 2009 article has only accumulated 5 Google Scholar citations, if most of the articles in the journal from the same year have no citations so far, you have a pretty good case to make.

The screenshot below shows an example where three quarters of the articles published in 2009 had 0 or 1 citation, with an average number of 2.16 citations per paper. In that case, you would be able to make a good case for future impact if you had 5 or more citations as early citations are usually reflective of high eventual citation counts.