4 ms·
Most people do actually judge by citations rather than raw pubs. It's an open secret that you can shove out papers (acceptance to any venue, regardless of the q
by colincooke 6y ago
Most people do actually judge by citations rather than raw pubs. It's an open secret that you can shove out papers (acceptance to any venue, regardless of the quality of the work is probabilistic) with enough effort. Getting cites is harder (other than self-cites which is a seperate issue).
When I look up a researcher first thing I look at is their number of citations and H-10 index, then I look through their top papers (the ones that have been cited a lot). As far as I know hiring committees also care about these things.
Of course it isn't the only thing that matters, or the most important, but its much more useful than raw number of papers published.
- mattkrause 6y agoEven those are garbage measures though. They can be gamed (albeit with a bit more effort), they vary a ton between fields and subfields, and citation rates often reflect the "prestige" of the lab/authors and the trendiness of the topic, rather than the intrinsic "merit" of a paper. I don't think there's any good automatic proxy for research quality.
- t_serpico 6y agoGarbage is a strong word. I think there's definitely a moderate to strong correlation between h-index and quality of researcher. The downside with the h-index is that it also measures your ability to play the 'game' (i.e network, cite your peers, etc.), but I really see no way around that. You can also argue that this is an important skill to have. If you produce the most amazing research in the world and people don't cite you, that could point toward a number of red flags (e.g you're an asshole, your work isn't clear to understand, you don't appropriately cite your peers, etc.)