In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.
I am concerned that phenomena similar to that of Kim
Kardashian may also exist in the scientific community. I think it is
possible that there are individuals who are famous for being famous
and
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.
Here, I propose that those people whose K-index is greater than 5 can
be considered ‘Science Kardashians’
Figure
1 from Hall, N. (2014). The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant
social media profile for scientists. Genome biology, 15(7), 424.
Your Kardashian index is calculated from your number of twitter
followers and the number of citations your scholarly papers have. You
can use the ‘Kardashian Index Calculator‘ to find out your own Kardashian Index, if you have a twitter account and a Google Scholar profile.
The implication of the Kardashian index is that the Foundation of
someone’s contribution to public debate about science is their academic
publishing. But public debate and scholarly debate are rightfully
different things, even if related. To think that only scientists should
be listened to in public debate is to think that other forms of skill
and expertise aren’t relevant, including the skill of translating between different domains of expertise.
Communicating scientific topics, explaining and interpreting new
findings and understanding the relevance of science to people’s lives
and of people’s lives to science are skills in itself. The Kardashian
Index ignores that, and so undervalues it. Full disclosure: My Kardashian Index is 25.
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