I'm interested in how I could assess prominence of specific scholars outside the STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields. As a scholar in the humanities or social sciences, how do you gauge the prominence of another scholar you previously never heard of?

In math, engineering, computer science and physics (I'm an applied math PhD student), a lot of papers are are available for free (as a preprint) on Arxiv and a lot of researchers are thoroughly catalogued on Google Scholar. So if I encounter a new academic "Ms. A", I can look up her work on Google Scholar to quickly skim her h-index, total citations, and read her most popular research works. This gives me some (but not all!) understanding of how reputed she is in her field. Skimming her works on Arxiv allows me to understand some subtleties of her work that aren't normally articulated on the news media. I was surprised to find out when a fellow PhD student in the humanities told me that she doesn't know of an analogous digital catalogue to quickly skim the works of other scholars.

My motivation to find out about this comes from the self-proclaimed experts appearing on media. Reputed public intellectuals aren't necessarily great academics, so I'm interested in finding out how I would go about and assess prominence of scholars in a non-STEM field.