It kind of regresses to a median. 1 big paper, and 100 papers with zero citations aren't that useful.
However, most top phd students/ assistant professors hover around the nebulous 5-30 hindex where getting 30 citations is a lot easier than publishing 30 papers. So, in most cases, you will prefer to figure out quantity, because the quality bar is so low. Additionally, they and lab mates always cite each other which leads to a free 10-ish citations overtime anyway. Lastly, authorship priority is not taken into account in hindex. So, a bunch of secondary-authors can easily get those numbers up at massively industrialized labs. So a small set of productive 1st authorships are given lower weightage than a large list of low-contribution 2nd authorships. Almost all super-high hindex professors are more like CEOs of a research company than primary researchers.
H-index, like all metrics is useful. It sort of shows the median quality of papers by an author assuming that equal time is spent on all papers. It is informative, but making it too important in academia has led to it getting gamed with counter-productive incentive structures.
H-index ignores away a lot qualities that are incredibly important to being a productive researcher, and has led to researchers with such qualities being progressively pushed out of academia ever since it has become THE target.
> assuming that equal time is spent on all papers.
And that's exactly what makes the h-index useless, every paper has a different effort put into it. I've had papers that required 5y of work, some others only 1 month... And yet they are counted the same.
Also the number of citations depends on the field, for people working across multiple fields you get papers that are highly important for a smaller community get less citations than low quality papers in a large community... Most papers are cited "by chance". Researcher type two keywords, cite paper that seem to go somewhat toward the wanted direction, rinse repeat.
> Lastly, authorship priority is not taken into account in hindex.
Given that there is no standardised way to determine authorship priority - given that this doesn't even make sense in plenty of cases - I really don't see that as a problem.
Apparently, some folks divine some nebulous properties from author order. Others just put authors in alphabetical order.
If you want to know who contributed what, ask the authors. You may get different answers from different authors, which is emphatically not a flaw.
(In contrast to the aforementioned divination procedure.)
However, most top phd students/ assistant professors hover around the nebulous 5-30 hindex where getting 30 citations is a lot easier than publishing 30 papers. So, in most cases, you will prefer to figure out quantity, because the quality bar is so low. Additionally, they and lab mates always cite each other which leads to a free 10-ish citations overtime anyway. Lastly, authorship priority is not taken into account in hindex. So, a bunch of secondary-authors can easily get those numbers up at massively industrialized labs. So a small set of productive 1st authorships are given lower weightage than a large list of low-contribution 2nd authorships. Almost all super-high hindex professors are more like CEOs of a research company than primary researchers.
H-index, like all metrics is useful. It sort of shows the median quality of papers by an author assuming that equal time is spent on all papers. It is informative, but making it too important in academia has led to it getting gamed with counter-productive incentive structures.
H-index ignores away a lot qualities that are incredibly important to being a productive researcher, and has led to researchers with such qualities being progressively pushed out of academia ever since it has become THE target.