For I-485, at least three forms are necessary: I-485, G-325A, and I-693. You can choose to file I-765 and I-131 if you want to apply for an EAD card and an advance parole.
For I-140 petition, you will need to fill in two forms:
If you documents are in a foreign language, you need to have them translated into English. The English translation will need to be notarized by a notary public. Photocopies of the original documents, translations, and notarizations can then be submitted for your green card application. In our application DIY Kit, we provide examples of English translations and notarizations.
Usually photocopies are enough for most documents. However, if you original document is in a foreign language, you will need to have the document translated into English. The translation then will need to be notarized by a notary public. You can keep the original notarizations and submit the photocopies.
Having a membership in a professional association is helpful for your EB1A or NIW petition. The invitation-only memberships, memberships that are granted to people with established credentials in a field, are definitely supportive materials. An invitation-only membership can be used as one of the three criteria for the EB1A or NIW petition.
There is no clear threshold for the times of citations. It is helpful to have 3 to 5 citations per article. If you feel that your citations are not strong, you probably want to compensate that with your recommendation letters.
Article citations can be proved by using citation index services. Three commonly used citation index services are ISI, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar. Both ISI and SCOPUS require subscription. However, Google Scholar is free and citation evidence obtained by Google Scholar is accepted by USCIS.
Recommendation letters from outside of your collaboration circle (your professor, your Ph.D. advisor, your manager, people you co-authored, etc.) are independent recommendation letters. Independent letters are deemed to be unbiased evaluation of your contributions and thus they could be of greater value in the eyes of immigration officers. For this reason, it is helpful to have them. However, there are cases where all recommendation letters are from the applicant’s collaboration circle. The bottom line is, getting them if you can. If you could not, it is also OK.
This will depend on whether EB1A/NIW is mentioned specifically in the recommendation letter. For example, if the recommendation letter has the sentence “to support Dr. XXX to apply for a green card as an alien worker with extraordinary ability”, you might not want to use it in your NIW petition. If you want to apply through both EB1A and NIW at the same time, you might want to prepare a set of two recommendation letters (one for EB1A and one for NIW) for each referee. The difference between the two letters could be just one sentence.
No, you do not seal your recommendation letters. Recommendation letters for green card application are open letters. In fact, you only need to submit photocopies of signed recommendation letters and keep the original signed recommendation letters to yourself.