Citation index going up, a little

This really doesn't mean a whole lot, but TPP has a sort of weird fascination with seeing where and how his publications are cited.  You don't want to be an example of "couldn't grab his butt with both hands", and so far so good, but it's interesting to find out what other people see in your publications, how they are used.  Now a number of indexes have been proposed that allow you to make all sorts of bogus comparisons.  Understand that you do some research, and then you write a paper in an attempt to publish it, and when that occurs, other people find out about your research and its results and conclusions with the result that they cite your work to show the background or rationale or similarities or differences to their work, but that takes time.  The longer you publish the more your publications can be cited or ignored.  The more you publish, the more your publications can be cited or ignored, and there is a domino effect because getting cited alerts other people to your publications.  TPP published his 1st scientific paper nearly 40 years ago and has published regularly if not prolifically ever since.  For the longest time my h-index was 17, meaning that 17 of my publications had at least 17 citations; some have more than a hundred.  Really important papers get thousands of citations.  Just recently my h-index went up to 18!  To get a really high h-index you have to have a lot of papers with a lot of citations.  That can be easier in some fields than in others depending on how much and how many people work in that field, and this does not count selfies (self-citation).  People with 2 or 3 times as many publications may not have an h-index any higher than mine, and this then is why this could be used as a gauge of your impact on a field scientifically.  A colleague and friend is in ornithology, and he's been prolific and important, and his h-index is 23.  A couple of my super-star colleagues have h-indexes of 28 and 35.  Both are in big fields, but both do very good research and are more prolific publishers.  A really low index would suggest you have either few publications or lots of publications that only make a very minimal impact.  My h-index may go up another notch or two ultimately as some newer publications begin to get into the literature, but not the stuff of a power-house.   

Citations - Scholarly Beans

When you publish in science, you must place your research into context, that is, you must show how your work relates to all other work relevant to your study and findings.  This is no small task and the list of citations in some of TPPs publications runs well upwards of 100.  This is somewhat easier to keep track of now, heck, it's a whole lot easier to keep track of now than at any time in the past.  In the early days of my career we'd spend at least one day a month shifting through a major research library looking for publications of interest, and maybe 2 or 3 days a year looking yourself up in the Science Citation Index.  Now good old Google Scholar not only tells you how many other authors have cited your publications, but how many citations each of your publications has had.  TPP is by no means a major publisher, but as Captain Jack Sparrow pointed out when called the worst pirate I've ever heard of,  "But you have heard of me."  So indeed my modest enough record of scholarship generates something on the average of 50 citations a year, and GS alerts the author to these citations because any publication that cites your work is likely to be a study you yourself are interested in.  When the titles of these publications pop up in the email, it's usually not too hard to guess which of my publications were cited.  Then TPP gets this: Capillary wave propagation during the delamination of graphene by the precursor films in electro-elasto-capillarity.  TPP has no idea what this means at all; the publication is totally opaque to this botanist.  Remember the particular area of expertise we be talking about here is floral biology, pollination, ecology, floral form and function.  Now perhaps someone has TPP confused with someone else.  After all Phactor is a fairly common name.  Actually not, and while still in the dark about its significance to this study, how biological organisms interact with certain physical parameters of the environment, particularly surface tension, was in these authors' opinions important.  TPP must admit a certain grudging respect for anyone who is so thorough in their literature search as to find that connection.  Score one small bean for the counters.