Edited sentence: If a researcher is writing cumulative papers in the same field for a long time it is likely that reference to his/her previous contributions will be made, and this creates a long 'tail' of papers with growing self-citations affecting the h-factor in a self-referenced way.The h-index as typically evaluated does not take into account the presence of self-citations.This is affecting the h-index wherever there is an ab(use) of the concept of networks, such as in huge collaborations especially within the European Community, with multi-PI approaches and a large number of coauthors.This issue is even more severe in the presence of large networks of researchers, as they can cite papers of people sharing the same alliance even if not coauthors