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

A cool paper by Bell et al has just come out in Nature Communications (abstract and link below). The study uses a hormonal manipulation to investigate the evolution or reproductive suppression in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Similar work has been done on banded mongooses. The national press picked up this recent paper because it was on meerkats, who in the UK are Russian and compare car insurance prices (this statement isn't meant to detract from the quality of the research). However, the response of the public to this work has been a bit odd, read the comments on the bottom of the dailymail coverage. I think these comments highlight the publics lack of understanding of how science works. A large amount of the comments seems to say that this has been known for ages because it was on Meerkat Manor, and so thought the work pointless. But this work is new and novel, providing an experimental approach to testing the hypothesis of adaptive reproductive suppression. What the tv series reported was based on correlational data and theories, but this work has proved it experimentally. I just hope that these comments say more about dailymail readers than it does about the average persons understanding of science and how it relates to semi-fictional soap-opera-style documentaries.

Bell, Cant, Borgeaud, Thavarajah, Samson & Clutton-Brock (2014) Suppressing subordinate reproduction provides benefits to dominants in cooperative societies of meerkats. Nature Communications.
In many animal societies, a small proportion of dominant females monopolize reproduction by actively suppressing subordinates. Theory assumes that this is because subordinate reproduction depresses the fitness of dominants, yet the effect of subordinate reproduction on dominant behaviour and reproductive success has never been directly assessed. Here, we describe the consequences of experimentally preventing subordinate breeding in 12 groups of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for three breeding attempts, using contraceptive injections. When subordinates are prevented from breeding, dominants are less aggressive towards subordinates and evict them less often, leading to a higher ratio of helpers to dependent pups, and increased provisioning of the dominant’s pups by subordinate females. When subordinate breeding is suppressed, dominants also show improved foraging efficiency, gain more weight during pregnancy and produce heavier pups, which grow faster. These results confirm the benefits of suppression to dominants, and help explain the evolution of singular breeding in vertebrate societies.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140722/ncomms5499/full/ncomms5499.html

and a link to that banded mongoose paper:
http://www.bandedmongoose.org/wp-content/uploads/Cant-et-al-2014-PNAS.pdf