Be proud to be a Kardashian

A paper has just appeared in Genome Biology (see paper here) that discusses the "Kardashian index". The idea behind the paper is that a scientist should attract a number of followers on twitter related to how cited their scientific papers are.

According to the formula in the paper I should have 302 followers on Twitter, whereas I currently have 1208 as I type this. By dividing the number of followers you actually have by the number you "should" have, you get the K (or Kardashian) index.

The author states that "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."

If you have a K index above 5, you are a "Science Kardashian" , i.e., you are akin to the Kardashians for having celebrity "despite having not achieved anything consequential in science".

Incidentally my K-index is 3.998, but I have several friends who have indexes of 5+

The scientist in question smugly says they have a K-index of 1.0 and so they must be doing things right.

To me, this suggests that they are doing things wrong. They are using Twitter for purely self-serving purposes, they're failing at communicating their science, and perhaps their online Twitter personae is boring to boot. Twitter is an effective tool for promoting science (e.g. see our recent paper here on Twitter's usefulness for conservation scientists). If you are a science-oriented Tweeter you may build up a reputation and followers not just because your own personal studies are interesting (I have to boast that I have had a few articles in journals score high altmetric scores because of social media interest), but because:

• what you tweet about is interesting to a wide audience;
• your tweets are timely about real world issues that people care about;
• your tweets make science seem interesting or accessible to the wider Twitter community including non-scientists;

• your tweets are probably not self-serving or self endulgent;
• your tweets may be funny and amusing and not just "in house" jokes - humor sells;
• you may have crafted an online persona that is open and likable - you get often followers if people feel that they can chat to you and you will respond in a cordial manner; 
• your tweets are trusted as a source of good, reputable science or other information.

Quite frankly, instead of being embarrassed about having a high Kardashian index, you should be proud. You are a good communicator and you are succeeding with science outreach; and science outreach is essential in this day and age, especially in the US where science ignorance is on the climb ... especially in Congress. Don't listen to those who try to put you down, carry on with what you are doing and keep getting those followers. In this case, be proud to be a Kardashian !


P.S. For a similar, but slightly different slanted article on why this paper is smug and patronizing have a look at this blog.