Wednesday, August 6, 2014

When Scientists, Social Media, and the Kardashians Collide

Normally, an article that cites Kim Kardashian's Wikipedia entry as a reference wouldn’t make it into a scientific journal. But last week, the journal Genome Biology published a commentary by genome scientist Neil Hall that did just that.

The paper, meant to be satirical, was titled “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists,” and it proposed a way of determining whether scientists on social media had more influence than their scientific renown would warrant. It proposed a measure called the K-index, which would compare a scientist's number of citations to his or her number of Twitter followers. Scientists who had more followers than citations would have a high K-index.

Read the full article

Originally published by Smithsonian.com 

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