Are you new to ResearchGate? Stats including the h-index are not being calculated every day. Therefore it may take some time to display your h-index found by ResearchGate. And it may happen that the value at RG will differ from the value at Google Scholar, see https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_citation_score_for_author_publications_looks_different_on_Scopus_research_gate_google_scholar.

Dear Shaun Yo The problem seems to be resolved in the meantime, see screenshot. Your h-index is 6 in RG as well.

Best regards.

An h index tells you the number of papers someone has that have been cited that many times. If I have 10 papers and each has at least 10 citations, I have an h index of 10.

In some fields, this can be an indicator of how relevant a researcher is/has been to the field. A high h index means that you are doing work that is very relevant/important to a field. This is only really true, though, in fields that are somewhat large.

If you work in a field that is very small, perhaps only a half dozen groups working on related problems in the world, you could put out a ton of revolutionizing papers and still have a low h index simply because there aren’t many people publishing in that field (a citation limited h index). Likewise, if you work in a field that is very difficult, on things that take years to do, you may not publish more than a paper in a year, perhaps even less (a publication limited h index).The average number of citations for a scientific article written in English is… wait for it, only 0.75. That is, most articles get cited 0–1 times. Only. In fact, the average number of readers for an an English language scientific article is only twice that number: 1.5. Amazing.

So when I speak with people who brag about how many articles they’ve written, I ask about their citations. It may be only a handful.

And when I am asked by academics I mentor whether they should make an effort to publish peer-review articles or a book chapters, I say both. The first to make unique contributions to the literature and advance your career. But book chapters will often get much wider readership.

And finally, when my students get dismayed because their articles didn’t get accepted for publication, I point out that at least they got read by two or more reviewers. And if their paper had been accepted, they may have only gotten one additional reader.

For Quora readership that hasn’t published, you should know that getting an article to and through the peer review process and published is an incredible amount of work. You have to be dedicated and perseverant. And often it seems insulting that so much work leads to such little impact. But it sometimes happens that hundreds of papers will cite your work and tens of thousands will have read it. But not often. But even when your papers only get a little by way of recognition, your work lives on in the way it shapes other’s thinking and other’s research.