My first impression when I heard about the Kardashian Index (K-index) was – it must be related in some way to your skin health, makeup, or fashion style. And why not? Kim Kardashian is a social media and fashion queen! To my surprise, the K-index had nothing to do with skin or fashion but with social for sure. K-index is a hilarious dig at the scientists (in all fields) which focuses on the discrepancy between a scientist’s social media following and the peer-reviewed publication citations.
So, what exactly is Kardashian Index?
Kardashian Index is a satire or bitter sarcasm (whatever you like) on “Science Kardashians” who have well-known social media profiles but not publications (core research expertise). This was first proposed by Niel Hall, a genome biologist, in a paper “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists” published in 2014 in Genome Biology. Simply speaking, it is one’s Twitter followers (or even Instagram, in today’s world) divided by one’s scientific citations.
Niel mentions “While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is concern that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices.” He proposed the ‘Kardashian Index’, as a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.
“A high K-index is a warning to the community that researcher X may have built their public profile on shaky foundations, while a very low K-index suggests that a scientist is being undervalued.“
– Niel Hall
Niel suggests that “all scientists calculate their own K-index on an annual basis and include it in their Twitter profile. Not only does this help others decide how much weight they should give to someone’s 140 character wisdom, it can also be an incentive – if your K-index gets above 5, then it’s time to get off Twitter and write those papers.”
The Critique
While the K-index term was meant to be a satire (of sorts), there are some interesting responses to this satire from the scientific community (which are perhaps high on the K-index). Here’s a link to some well-articulated critiques of the publication.
Micah Allen, a neuroscientist in UK, understands the fun behind the satire but also disagrees with it. He said “While a (sorta) funny joke, it is this point that has done the most disservice by Neil’s article. We (the Kardashians) are democratizing science. We are filtering the literally unending deluge of papers to try and find the most outrageous, the most interesting, and the most forgotten, so that they can see the light of day beyond wherever they were published and forgotten. We seek these papers to generate discussion and to garner attention where it is needed most. We are the academy’s newest, first line of defense, contextualizing results when the media runs wild with them.”
“We the Kardashians are Democratizing Science”
– Micah Allen, Neuroscientist, UK
While it’s clear that K-index is not going mainstream for gatekeeping or indexing scientific influencers, it will be interesting to watch this continued pen fight as this discrepancy is here to stay (unless the current and next gen scientists get a bit more digital-savvy)!
References:
1. Hall, N. The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists. Genome Biol 15, 424 (2014). [Article Link]
2. TheGuardian article Link
3. Cover image credit – Matt Wesson
4. blogs.lse.ac.uk
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