Citations help you out in the long-time limit for sure; &quot;worlds 7th most cited chemist&quot; is definitely an improvement on &quot;another dude with a bunch of Nature papers.&quot; But I would imagine that when you are going toward important early-career milestones (postdoc&#x2F;assistant prof&#x2F;tenure), they are mostly looking at your recent work, which will not have had time to accrue too many citations unless it is the absolute hottest thing. In those cases, journal ranking may be a bigger differentiator. I don&#x27;t know how one would fix this.