Date: TBA
Time: TBA
Place: TBA

The title of this tutorial is clickbait! However, a high h-index (relative to the stage of your career), will make you advisor, chair, dean and chancellor happy, and it can help you get a job or get promoted. Moreover, I will show that h-indices are highly susceptible to the Matthew Effect, a high h-index may help you get funding and attract strong collaborators/students, which in turn will likely further increase your h-index! Thus, “kickstarting” your h-index early in your career can pay huge dividends.

It goes without saying that optimizing your h-index is not the same as optimizing your scientific impact. Note that John Clauser, the 2022 Nobel prize winner in physics has an h-index of just 29. However, a high h-index does mean that you have been prolific at publishing papers, and it also means that the community does read and cite these papers.

In this tutorial, I show that beyond pure quality of your research, there are many “tricks” you can do to increase both your paper’s chance of acceptance, and increase its number of citations, thus optimizing your h-index.

Please note that there are ways to increase your h-index that are clearly disingenuous and bad for the community (citation cartels, ghost authorships etc.). However, I believe that all the ideas presented in this tutorial are legal, moral, and are generally helpful for the entire community.

Outline

1. Welcome
2. What is the h-index, why does it matter?
3. The many limitations of the h-index
4. What is counted towards an h-index?
   • Some lower hanging fruit: Tutorials/ Datasets/ Contests/ Surveys
5. The million dollar question, why do some papers get cited more than others?
6. The Mathew Effect
   • How it affects citations
   • How to make it work for you
   • Evidence and anecdotes
7. Adding value to your paper
   • Creating datasets that people want
   • Creating useable code (is harder than you think)
   • Algorithms rarely get highly cited, definitions, representations, and primitives do.
8. Keogh’s Cold Call Technique
9. Collaborate with more mature researchers
   • Papers with famous first authors get more citations. Note that this is in addition to, not instead of, working on your own.
10. Optimizing Titles/Abstracts for Search Engines
    • Making your work “findable”.
    • “Branding” your ideas.
11. Choose the right venue
    • Conference or Journal (or both!)? Which conference?
12. Publish Open Access
    • Open access papers get more citations. Publishing open access can be more expensive, but your can do it for free! (see Sherpa Romeo)
13. Networking. Making the most of attending conferences and meetings.
14. Social media
    • Efficient use of social media can help research impact, but avoiding the rabbit hole is important.
15. Conclusions

Target Audience

The main audience for this talk is grad students nearing the end of their studies and assistant professors. However, full professors are often called on to mentor junior professors, so they may find these skills useful to pass on. While the tutorial is mostly aimed at academics, it is known that some industrial labs weight h-indices when promoting and hiring.

Presenters

Dr. Keogh is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California. He achieved an h-index of 100 less than 19 years after starting his first academic job. With 32 papers, he is the most prolific author in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal and a top-ten most prolific author in ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM and SIAM SDM (with 31/45/25 papers respectively). He has won numerous awards, including: The Bell Labs Bronze Prize 2021, the ACM SIGKDD 2022 Test of Time Paper Award, the 2021 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award, Two Google Faculty Awards and best paper awards at SIGKDD(2), SIGMOD, ICDM(2) and SDM.