The H-index is increasingly being used to evaluate scholarly productivity and as one or many factors in tenure and promotion decisions. The H-index is a measure of the number of times articles written by a scholar have been cited. Knowing your own H-index and understanding the various quirks in how the H-index score is arrived can be important for managing your career.
Writing methods papers/commentaries or primers on study design or study techniques can be a very useful career booster. A strong methods paper can cite well and will have longevity, thus contributing to your H-index. These papers can be “back-burner” projects you work on sporadically while there is down time in your substantive research, such as when you are waiting for data collection to be completed or for the lab to finish running assays for you. They can also be good projects to work on with graduate students. Methods papers also serve the greater good of hopefully reducing the amount of flawed research being done and/or pointing out where prior research may have generated spurious conclusions.
Odds ratios diverge from prevalence ratios as outcome prevalence in the reference group increases. (Lovasi et al 2012)
As a career development tool it is very useful to develop skills in illustration and graphic design. Several journal editors have told me that illustrations in a paper, especially those that depict a key concept, theory or causal path way, can improve the citation rate of the paper. I think this will be especially true now that PubMed Central has the ability to search for illustrations and includes illustrations in search results.
Another advantage of providing illustrations is that their availability online often co-opts others into describing the concept in question in your terms. Researchers often download the images from PubMed Central and use them in their classes, lectures and seminars and then explain the concepts using the language in the figure caption.
Here is an illustration of mine that I have seen used in presentations.
(Mutation Research, 2006)