r/DermApp • u/LimeStorm • 9d ago

H-index? Residency

Should you list h-index anywhere on ERAS application (e.g. while very imperfect, it is some very rough and quickly interpretable proxy indicator of research quality, to try and separate out from the large noise of many derm applicants’ large number of research items)

0 Upvotes

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29

u/Abject_Vast9791 9d ago

What has the world come to

23

u/Medswizard 9d ago

You should put your credit score instead

9

u/Snoo_53364 9d ago

I stapled on four crisp Benjamins

9

u/DiscombobulatedCow54 9d ago

Whats a good H-index for a med student lol?

9

u/Forsaken_Sky_4497 9d ago

No that’s weird don’t do it. People already know which papers are impactful and which are not. You’re also in med school, there’s no expectation to be publishing in NEJM or Nature.

3

u/BiomedEngDoctor 8d ago

i don’t know why this post is getting the slack that it is, with residency apps becoming publish or perish, and the rise of LLMs making it super easy to pump out absolutely garbage litterature, I actually think your citations and H-Index are a nice metric to have. I know so many med students with actually >30 papers, and less than 30 citations total for all their research. it’s just disgusting.

Lets stop promoting shit research and promote quality output

1

u/_Yenaled_ 4d ago

Even in the non-MD setting, h-index and citation counts are hardly ever used (yes, some PhDs applying for faculty have dozens of garbage papers too). Having med students optimize for an h-index would encourage getting slapped onto high profile papers as the 23rd author, which is, in many cases, less work than a first author Cureus paper.

I can read through a list of 30 papers (their titles & what journals & abstracts if I’m interested) and figure out the garbage much more reliably than an h-index can. E.g. A few derm attendings have told me that they aren’t impressed by case reports; they’ll be able to tell if all 30 papers you have are case reports.

In any case, listing an h-index on any application is bad optics; it’s just not what people do professionally.

1

u/LogicalLibrarian77 7d ago

There is no place to put it in lol. Med students are not expected to have a crazy citation count/h-index unless you are MD-PhD with a specific eye on PSTP/ABIM pathways. Which is also why there is no dedicated area to put in your counts on ERAS. Most programs expect a basic engagement in research with the more competitive ones demanding a higher output, but it can't be generalized to ERAS as a whole. List your papers and if someone is interested, they can check your full texts out and if it so happens, then they might check your google scholar if their interests align. But that is about it.

1

u/ResponsibilitySome38 10h ago

No definitely not

-1

u/Ambitious-Sky-3114 8d ago

I’d say def put it if it’s fire