Making your case for tenure and promotion? Use PoP to compare citations to your papers to the journal average

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to make the case for academic impact in your application for tenure or promotion

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 25 Nov 2025 16:09)

Many academics use the Publish or Perish software to make a case for tenure, promotion, or any other type of research evaluation and want to show the citation impact of their work. Obviously, citations are a flawed measure of impact (see Research Impact 101), but in many institutions it is still the most dominant measure used.

In this context, please understand that it is your job to convince and educate your tenure or promotion panel of the citation impact of your research. Many senior academics, having grown up in an age in which citations were relatively unimportant, have a limited knowledge of their own or other academics’ citation records. Moreover, many academics have the tendency to subconsciously overestimate what their own records were when they went up for tenure or promotion. Hence, they are implicitly using an inappropriate reference group.

You might think it is unfair to have to do all this work to get tenure or promotion. You may also think senior academics should know better. That might well be true but remember that they are only human and are very busy academics. Moreover, many other processes in academia (e.g., any further promotions, job applications, funding applications, research awards, and fellowship applications) depend on you making a case for the impact of your research. Hence it is not a bad idea to get some skills in “selling” your record!

Compare yourself to a reference group

One strategy to demonstrate your impact is to compare yourself to a reference group, focusing on academics in your discipline or university. However, this might feel a bit "tacky" or overly competitive, and - if there are only a few academics in your reference group - might be seen as a personal attack (Look! I am "better" than all of my colleagues). 

But what better reference group than other articles published at the same time in the same journal? In this post, I will show you how you can make your case for academic research impact by strategically comparing your papers to their journal reference group. To do so, simply search for the journal you published in, and set the years to the year of your publication. To make your case you can pursue several avenues.

Most cited paper in the journal that year

The Publish or Perish screenshot below compares my 2001 paper published in Journal of World Business with other papers published in the same year. You can see it is the most highly cited paper in the journal in that particular year and its citations compared well with the journal average. You could write this up in your case as: “My 2001 paper in Journal of World Business was the most cited paper out of 25 papers published that year and had more than three times as many citations as the average paper in the journal that year.”

Incidentally, this analysis also shows how flawed the strategy of assuming impact based on the average journal citation rate is. The three most-cited articles in this journal had more than thirty times as many citations as the three least cited papers.

Most cited single-authored paper

Now of course it won’t happen very often that your paper is the most cited article in the journal in its year of publication. So, you can be a bit creative in this as well. The Publish or Perish screenshot below shows my 2000 publication in the Journal of International Business Studies.

My paper was not the most cited paper in the journal that year, but it was the 2nd most cited single-authored paper and the 5th most cited paper overall (out of 44), which in a top US journal might be seen as a significant achievement.

In my promotion application, I combined this observation with a statement that: “I am one of only two academics affiliated with an Australian university who has ever published a single-authored article in Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) since it was established 37 years ago.”

If you work outside North America and have published in a North American journal, you could also make an argument that publishing in these journals is more difficult from outside North America. Check whether your paper is (one of) the most cited article by a non-North American academic or whether it is (one of) the most cited article by an academic from your own country.

Paper in top 5% or top 10% most cited

Of course, it will not happen very often that your paper is one of the most-cited papers in the journal in question. However, even being able to say that it is within the top 5% or top 10% most cited papers that year would make a very significant contribution to your case. If you are lucky, you might have articles that are amongst the most-cited articles in a particular journal over a longer period. If you could say that your article was among the top 5% or top 10% most cited articles in a journal over its entire history of publication that would make a very strong case, especially if the journal was a particularly well-known journal. 

My 2009 article with Nancy Adler in the Academy of Management Learning & Education was in the top 1% of articles (11th out of more than 1,000 papers) published in AMLE since its inception in 2002 with a total of well over 1,000 (Google Scholar) citations (see above). This would be a strong claim for its impact.

However, it is not such a good idea to use this strategy if your paper was published early in the period you are reporting on. For instance, if you claim that your paper is amongst the 25% most cited articles in a journal between 2000-2022, and your paper was published in 2000/2001, it is likely that your paper was cited less than average for articles published in 2000 and 2001.

Sorting publications by the number of citations per year (the second column) is a good way to avoid this problem as this automatically corrects for the age of the article. If we sort the above screenshot on citations per year, my article with Nancy moves down to #12 and several recent contributions, published between 2015 and 2024, now rank much higher in the list.

Compare a body of work

If you do not have any papers that really stand out, but your papers are generally well cited in comparison to the journals that they are published in, you could emphasise this. For instance, you could say something like: “on average my articles are amongst the top 20%-30% most cited papers when compared to papers published in the same journal in the same year”.

You will need to be a little careful with this strategy though. Unless you have some papers that have been published in journals that your evaluation committee will recognise as top journals, it will only elicit the comment that you tend to “waste your work” by publishing it in low impact journals. So, you may need to combine this strategy with some evidence that the journals you have published in have high standards of peer review.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...
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PoP donation (small) GBP 1.00
PoP donation (medium) GBP 10.00
PoP donation (large) GBP 50.00
PoP donation (corporate) GBP 500.00
Publish or Perish Guide (2023) as PDF [363 pages] GBP 5.95

Note: all prices are in Pounds Sterling (GBP). VAT is applied as required.

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 25 Nov 2025 16:09

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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