If you're a researcher, these questions might sound familiar: How many papers have I published? Are they in good journals or conferences? What's my citation count and h-index? Will I get into this program or secure that internship? Can I become a professor?
Zoom out.
Most people — probably more than you could imagine — don’t even know what an h-index is or what a professor exactly does.
Being a Stanford professor is a big thing… in that academic world. The majority of people don’t even know where Stanford is or why it is such a good school. Hell, I don’t even know all the reasons why Stanford is such a good school. Most people just don’t give a shit about that.
But even the people who do give a shit about that cannot fully grasp the complexity of your situation. Is your paper of low quality because it was rejected from the top venues? Papers cited hundreds of times residing only on preprint servers are here to disprove that. Are you a bad researcher because you have a lower h-index? Nobel prize winners are here to disprove that.
Your (work) life has much more nuance than can be quantified through these numbers.
Don’t let your research profile gain too much importance. Don’t get me wrong, doing good research is important (if research is your goal). But having prestigious publications or highly cited papers is a byproduct of that.
Remember: You are not your papers. You are not your citations. Read that again.