My Kardashian Index is 0

Earlier this year, I blogged about metrics for measuring scientific output such as a H-index, AltMetric, etc. I just came across an entertaining little paper in Genome Biology by Neil Hall about a new metric- The Kardashian Index. Neil was wondering whether there are scientists who are like Kim Kardashian- famous for being famous. Or more specifically, whether there were scientists who are famous for their twitter feeds or blogs, but have not produced much in terms of published research papers of significance. So, he came up with the Kardashian Index- your number of twtitter followers divided by your number of citations from your published scientific papers.

I'm proud to say my Kardashian Index is 0 - since I have no Twitter followers, and 32,000+ citations. Ok, ok, since I am a conscientious objector to twitter, Facebook, etc, and have never tweeted in my life, it's probably not a relevant metric to me.

Fig. 1 from the Kardashian Index paper- identifying scientists who are highly active on social media but don't actually produce much scientific output.