The Common Pitfalls In EB-1A Evidence Gathering

Gathering evidence for your EB-1A acclaim is a herculean task. With no information other than the 10 criteria given on the USCIS official website, you’ll have a lot of doubts and questions about your EB-1A journey. Many times you might ask yourself,

“Am I doing it right? Or Is there something more to these criteria that I’m missing?”

So, if you’ve ever asked this question, this is for you. Here we talk about pitfalls surrounding the 4 EB-1A criteria that most people fall into. Read on to ensure you don’t trip and fall during your journey towards Einstein Visa.

Judging The Work Of Others

The USCIS Criteria: Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel.

Common pitfalls surrounding this criteria:

• Submitting evidence for judgement of work done as a part of your job

Judging the work of others as a part of your job doesn’t count as evidence for this category. For example, reviewing your team member’s code or supervising someone in their thesis isn’t proof. Instead, you should prove that you’ve been invited to and successfully judged the work of others outside your job role because of your professional merit.

• Submitting evidence for judging works that don’t fall under your field of acclaim

Claiming to be qualified for the judging category but submitting evidence for judging work outside your field of acclaim is comparing apples and oranges. For example, if your acclaim is cloud architecture in AWS, but your area of judgment is different, then it wouldn’t help your case.

• Submitting evidence for invitations but not completion of judgment

No matter the number of invitations for judgment you get, none of them counts unless you complete them successfully. For example, if you received 5 invitations but completed the judgment of only one, you can only submit proof for the completed one.

Significant Contribution In Your Field Of Acclaim

The USCIS Criteria: Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field.

Common pitfalls surrounding this criteria:

• Claiming to be qualified when your patent is pending

Applying for a patent won’t make a piece of evidence for your EB-1A self-petition. When your patent is pending, it means your request for a patent will either be approved or denied. It doesn’t give the adjudicators any solid proof of your extraordinary ability.

• Claiming to be qualified when your product is patented but not distributed by a business

If you think getting your patent granted is the light at the end of the tunnel, here’s a shocking revelation: that’s not all. A patent is indeed a projection of your expertise and the contributions you’ve made to your industry. But unfortunately, the adjudicators won’t consider you qualified unless a business implements your product and earns a huge profit from it.

This makes this criteria one of the trickiest and most difficult of all the others.

Authorship of Scholarly Articles

The USCIS Criteria: Evidence of your authorship of scholarly articles in professional or major trade publications or other major media.

Common pitfalls surrounding this criteria:

• Submitting your Ph.D. thesis as evidence

Your Ph.D. thesis might help you get past the first step of the EB-1A judging criteria where the only question is whether you have published material. But to emerge triumphant in the final merit determination, you need to prove the significance of your research in your field.

This is where submitting a Ph.D. thesis backfires. Since a thesis is a mandatory requirement for anyone doing Ph.D., your officer might find it difficult to gauge the importance of your work. Thus, instead of helping you stand out, it makes it difficult for you to cut through the clutter.

• Submitting soft publications as evidence

There are a lot of soft publications out there that are ready to publish your work in exchange for a publication fee. Their only requirement is that your topic should lie inside their area of interest. Just like a Ph.D. thesis, these publications might help you wade through the initial adjudication step. But since these aren’t peer-reviewed, your adjudicators might find them insignificant.

• Submitting digital articles or those that haven’t been cited

This isn’t exactly a pitfall, but doing this can drastically reduce your EB-1A success rate.

Your adjudicator is just like any layman out there. They are no experts in your field and hence won’t read your research to arrive at a conclusion. But they look for certain factors to understand whether a research article is significant enough.

For instance, a print article is often considered more trustworthy than a digital article. This is because anyone can put out anything on the web, and there’s no way to cross-check their credibility.

Another instance is the citations of your article. When other researchers cite your work, it gives the officers proof of its significance.

Peer-reviewed articles are another example. Peer-reviewed articles are those that are rigorously reviewed by experts in the field to evaluate whether they are worth publishing. Thus, when you’ve a peer-reviewed article, it shows the merit of your expertise to the adjudicating officer.

Published Material About You

The USCIS Criteria: Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media.

Common pitfalls surrounding this criteria:

• Giving a feature on an internal website as evidence for published material

Getting featured on your company website for your achievements has no value. For example, getting featured on your company website for designing a new product playing a huge role in maximizing their revenue won’t count as evidence. On the other hand, if you get featured in one of the major publications of your field for the same reason, that counts as credible evidence.

• Getting featured for a reason outside their field of acclaim

If the published material about you doesn’t mention anything about your acclaim, it doesn’t count. This includes material featuring your personal life or contributions outside your field of acclaim. Apart from this, you should also ensure that the publication featuring material about you is not regional but has a wider circulation.

Now that you know the pitfalls in EB-1A evidence gathering, what are you waiting for? Collect the evidence that matters and build a strong EB-1A case.

Have more questions about EB-1A? Reach out to our EB-1A green card coach today!