How to improve the outcome of performance evaluations in terms of percentiles for citation frequencies of my papers

•For a given number of citations, the evaluation of the performance in terms of percentiles can depend strongly on the subject category.•The proper choice of the journal for a manuscript thus influences the outcome of the evaluation.•This effect is particularly strong for journals from different fields, but also from different subject categories in the same field.•These observations are exemplified by an empirical investigation for 5 of my own publications.

Using empirical data I demonstrate that the result of performance evaluations by percentiles can be drastically influenced by the proper choice of the journal in which a manuscript is published.