>>13759916Congrats OP, I unironically think we might even make faculty some days, half the midwits doing a M don't publish anything during their Masters and according to some metrics even having an h-index as low as 3-4 can get you a good postdoc. My Masters publication was also cited two times after a year and now it's up to 50 after 3 years, it's insane how many different fields have used my field too, very rewarding. If you get citations early it will snowball to more quickly. I should finish my PhD with 7 publications and ~80 citations. Sadly this is still only the top 10% of all researchers who started publishing my year so far (basically you really need to break into the 1% from what I understand), but it is already in the top 50% of all chemical engineering researchers alive (so including late career profs) so I think for our field really high citations come later.
Anyway aim for around h-index 5 after your PhD, publish earlier than you think you should. I only published 1 paper in my first year and 2 in my second year; those papers have only 8 and 2 cites in total respecitively so far it takes too long to build up. Really aim to get 2 quality papers in CES or CEJ in your first year, it's worth way more than getting more in total.
>>13759916They still mean a lot if you are the first author. They mean fuckall on a paper where you are >3 author. But still if you have 2000+ citations early career people will take you seriously (and they do mostly use Google Scholar to screen you). Even on your own first author papers they will nail you in interviews about what you actually did in your publication. If you did the writing, code, conceptualization etc. all that matters a lot more now especially if the position is well paid, but if your impact on your first authorships are shit then it won't matter, they won't even invite you for the first round.
t. Got a two positions at decent labs, one working under one of the top 20 researchers in the country right now.
