349. The question of quality

Last time we had a nice, surprisingly long discussion trying to answer the question how much should you publish in order to be considered a successful postdoc From Michal’s point of view, this is not quantity but quality of your publications that should matter.

Actually, I completely agree with this point of view – that’s how it should work in the idealized world. However, the quantity of papers that you publish per year still matters. Imagine that people from hiring committee in the place where you are applying to are not quite familiar with your work, while the average number of citations per paper of yours is about 10 (typical situation for a good fresh graduate student, isn’t it?). There are hundreds of applications similar to yours that they go through. In practice, it means that in the first round hiring committee will probably choose people with longer list of publications. Or, what is more probable, they will choose people with larger overall number of citations, presumably a good measure of quality of your work.

I wouldn’t be I if I wouldn’t try to quantify the problem – quantify the quality of our work So, the first question I would like to ask is as follows: how good is the total number of citations as a metrics of the quality of your work? If not, is it possible that some other metrics work better? For example, I’ve heard that it is virtually impossible to get permanent position if your h-factor is below 10 Is h-factor is good enough to quantify the quality of your work?

Bonus video: Worst jobs in science 2007, ABC News version.