One disadvantage of the h-index is that relevance of a result is not always measured by number of citations.

For example, what I believe to be my best result (settling a long standing conjecture on the size of a search engine index) has very few citations, since the paper pretty much closes the problem.

But overall it is definitely better than the simple number-of-papers count which is sometimes used by unenlightened tenure committees.

Alex Lopez-Ortiz

Although it is true that student evaluations are not the only way to appraise teaching. If it were, research universities would have a hard time recruiting undergraduates.

Even so, I think that the real issue is the research itself, and not either student esteem or self-esteem. We are all frustrated by having to write gory proofs in papers, and by having to add macho theorems to the sweet aphorisms in the abstract. But in both cases, you have to earn the right to skip the hard part. If you are sure that someone can fill in the hard part, from any combination of divine inspiration and your own private sweat, then you have earned it. Otherwise skipping the hard part is either foolish or shallow.

For example, you’re right that the insight of the obfuscation paper can be summarized in two sentences, but at least for me, I needed the 43 pages to validate that insight. This is especially true for papers (such as this one) showing a negative result. The natural response to a negative result is to try to see if we can’t bypass it by changing some of the underlying assumptions. Since the underlying assumptions can be changed in many natural ways, the result is a 43 page paper.

There are other reasons I sometimes want to add more results to a paper. Suppose that there is some nice lemma that you came up with while working on the paper, which at the end turned out to be related but not strictly needed to the main result. My tendency would be to add it to the paper anyway. First, for my sake, if I’ll ever need that lemma I’ll have it in a written, verified and polished form. Also others may find it useful. Sometime they may even find this “side lemma” more useful than the main result.

–Boaz

I don’t completely agree with the premise of this question. Many authors work too hard, or wait too long, to add “non-trivial” results to their papers. (And I may be one of them.) But many other authors make the opposite mistake: they make papers out of busywork that lacks any good idea. I think that the first kind of mistake is at least more honorable than the second. And I also think that in our information-choked age, the second problem is more widespread and more insiduous too.

After all, do you think that people who set out to maximize their “H-index” or equivalent wait until they have done something hard?

But I agree that if you have an idea, you should carefully weigh its merits, even if it is a simple idea. If it is a good idea, you should not wait to top it with something else hard or complicated.

The catch is that weighing the merits of a new idea is not so easy. One honorable way to test it, even if it is sometimes a mistake, is to push it further with that non-trivial extra. So I think that Levin’s mistake (as you describe it) is excusable; it was not an unmotivated goof.

On the other hand, Karp especially has had the brilliant, deft touch of identifying important ideas that are simple or only medium-complicated.