  One interesting phenomenon that emerges from the typical structure of social
networks is the friendship paradox. It states that your friends have on average
more friends than you do. Recent efforts have explored variations of it, with
numerous implications for the dynamics of social networks. However, the
friendship paradox and its variations consider only the topological structure
of the networks and neglect many other characteristics that are correlated with
node degree. In this article, we take the case of scientific collaborations to
investigate whether a similar paradox also arises in terms of a researcher's
scientific productivity as measured by her H-index. The H-index is a widely
used metric in academia to capture both the quality and the quantity of a
researcher's scientific output. It is likely that a researcher may use her
coauthors' H-indexes as a way to infer whether her own H-index is adequate in
her research area. Nevertheless, in this article, we show that the average
H-index of a researcher's coauthors is usually higher than her own H-index. We
present empirical evidence of this paradox and discuss some of its potential
consequences.
