An h-index of n means that n of your articles have at least n citations each. So, if new citations concentrate on only a few articles, the h-index will not grow. - As an example: The h-index is 10, meaning that 10 articles have at least 10 citations. If 9 of these articles get new citations, but the tenths arcticle does not get new ones, and also all other articles will have no more than 10 citations, the h-index will remain to be 10.

Dear Asmaa Uthman The point made by Wolfgang R. Dick is easy to view in your Google Scholar profile https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Xq5OvqoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Your (ranked) 12th paper received (so far) 10 citations. As long as this paper does not reach 12 citations your h-index will remain 11.

Best regards.

PS. When this happens then at least 12 papers received at least 12 citations.

To attain a high h-index, you have to publish a lot and have it cited a lot. You also need to have been publishing for long enough that many of your papers have been around long enough to have noticed and cited many times.

So to have a very high h-index, it helps if you:

• Are a very productive researcher;
• Are in your 50s or 60s, and have been publishing since you were in your 20s;
• Have worked with many students or collaborators, so you haven’t had to personally do all the work in all those papers yourself;
• Have consistent funding for your research, helping you to pay for equipment, travel, students and postdocs to help progress your work — for this, you probably need to have good ideas and be good at writing grant proposals;
• Are in a popular, active field of research, so there are many other researchers publishing in the same general area who can cite your work;
• Are publishing work that is interesting and influential, so people have a reason to cite it;
• Are strategic about which questions you tackle with your research and how you divide your research up into papers;