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Anonymous ID: fef484 Feb. 22, 2022, 7:42 a.m. No.15690929   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0954

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0?source=post_page-----–

 

The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists

Neil Hall

Genome Biology volume 15, Article number: 424 (2014)

 

Abstract

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.

Anonymous ID: fef484 Feb. 22, 2022, 7:45 a.m. No.15690954   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>15690929

https://mobile.twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1495646720906117120

 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495646720906117120.html

 

@PhilWMagness

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Feb 21 • 17 tweets • 4 min read

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A survey on the use of the Kardashian Index (KI) in scholarly journals before 2022. Several detractors of the recent KI paper on the Great Barrington Declaration vs. John Snow Memo insist that it is just a joke, but in fact there's a well-established scientific lit.

  1. Original paper by Hall, proposing the Kardashian Index. Yes - he named it in jest, but the paper addressed a serious question of a reputational mismatch between scientific accomplishment and social media presence. IOW it was an attempt to quantify that

 

The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists - Genome Biology

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 …

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0?source=post_page-----–

After Hall's article, scholars in several scientific subfields asked themselves if there was a social media distortion in scholarly perceptions of work in their fields - hence looking for high Kardashian Indexes.

Hence we get:

 

  1. Vilanilam et al (2020), which sampled twitter accounts of interventional neuroradiologists to see if the field displayed susceptibility to academics with high Kardashian Indexes.

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1971400920950928?casa_token=zOoHqQY2r0kAAAAA%3Amj1-rv8BrKi9nX8_zELcjHb34jNiD8TREMl8geIhkC1H2FQkZX1U5_NcS2LjArr08672-zeHcvo

  1. Khan et al 2020 takes a similar approach to measure the KI among cardiologists.

 

https://www.jacc.org/doi/full/10.1016/j.jaccas.2019.11.068

  1. Ebrahim (2015) proposes modifications to the KI to improve its ability to capture the social media/citation disparity.

 

Modified Kardashian Index: A Measure of Discrepant Social Media Profile for Scientists

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2588206

  1. Cosco (2015) used the KI as a tool to interpret the social media presence of academic journals in dissemination of their published works.

 

Medical journals, impact and social media: an ecological study of the Twittersphere

Background: Twitter is an increasingly popular means of research dissemination. I sought to examine the relation between scientific merit and mainstream popularity of general medical journals. Method…

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/187/18/1353.short

  1. Kolahi (2017) suggested the KI could be similarly adapted to study the twitter presence of dentists.

 

https://www.proquest.com/docview/1879103443?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

  1. Kolahi et al (2019) expand the discussion of twitter & dental journals, suggesting further ways to adapt the KI.

 

Analysis of highly tweeted dental journals and articles: a science mapping approach - British Dental Journal

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41415-019-0212-z

  1. Chandrasekar et al (2019) use the KI to study the twitter presences of urologists.

 

jdc.jefferson.edu/cgi/viewconten…

  1. You (2014) uses the KI to look at "science celebrities" on Twitter.

 

Science | AAAS

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.345.6203.1440

  1. Linz et al (2021) discuss adaptions of the KI to electrophysiology.

 

https://academic.oup.com/europace/article/23/8/1192/6214927?login=true

  1. Brito (2021) discuesses its applications to urogynecology.

 

Is social media really impacting urogynecology? - International Urogynecology Journal

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00192-020-04361-x

There are numerous other examples in this vein, as well as studies debating the accuracy and validity of the KI as a serious scientific measurement.

 

Strangely, certain scientists only became concerned about the KI when it showed that the lockdowners had higher KIs than the GBD.

As for methodology, the KI is admittedly tongue-in-cheek. But it's also a way to create an empirical measure of a genuinely interesting phenomenon: the role of twitter celebrities in distorting the perceptions of scientific claims.

Sure enough, the lockdown debate turns out to be a prime example of a case where twitter celebrities did have an outsized influence on one side of that debate.

 

Now many of those same twitter celebrities are mad about their own high KIs.

Note that none of them dispute the accuracy of their own KIs. So instead they attack the use of the index (which, it turns out, has a large and growing pre-2022 literature) and the motives of the author who applied it to them.