[mattkrause]

I don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition.

Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.

[bjourne]

That is false. The first thing everyone (at least everyone in CS---IDK about other fields) looks at are h-indexes, impact factors, number of papers per year, university rankings, and similar metrics. Researchers are most definitely selecting collaborators with a high h-index.