Kardashian controversy

A recent paper has come out in Genome Biology by Neil Hall, the paper investigates what Hall terms the Kardashian index (number of twitter followers/scientific citations). This has gotten a lot of people upset, and potentially rightly so. I've put a link to the Nature web page with an article on the paper. Science communication is a crucial part of modern research and is a great way for young scientists to communicate their work (and potentially increase their citation rate in the process) to the wider scientific community and the public in general. Many disciplines, behavioural ecology included, have journals with low citation rates but are investigating aspects of science that the public find interesting. Genomics, Dr Hall's field, is probably the other way around: with lots of publications in high impact biomedical journals but being a complicated and often difficult field to explain to the lay person. One criticism that has been laid at the paper is that it's sexist, especially with the use of Kim Kardashian's name for the index. I disagree, as the only male celebrities that I can think of who would fit into that category are on TOWIE and MIC and I don't even know their names, so why would someone in the US or Switzerland know who they are? It's good that people are discussing how best to measure scientists impact and this sort of discourse can only benefit science. I disagree with the K-index but can see it has some measure of merit, maybe it needs to include the number of years that the researcher has been publishing for? Possibly a K+ index (twitter followers/(scientific citations/years publishing))?? Food for thought.

Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews


Hall (2014) The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists. Genome Biology, 15:424
In the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one. While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger 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. To help quantify this, I propose the ‘Kardashian Index’, 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.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews