Relying just on h-index is bad in the first places. I habe colleagues in experimental physics who are on papers with tens of coauthors, working only on a small

Relying just on h-index is bad in the first places. I habe colleagues in experimental physics who are on papers with tens of coauthors, working only on a small bit that enabled multiple experiments and have an amazing hindex. you cannot compare that to a theoretically working niche field. In the end it is about wrong incentives in science. See also this article on rising self citations [0] . Having said that h-index is a good KPI to track for myself. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00090-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00090-z