By Ann Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.
Do you tweet about science?
Would you consider using twitter to find out about the latest science?
Science magazine has recently published an article(1) about
the K-index, based on an article written by biologist Neil Hall at Liverpool
University in the UK (The
Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists, Genome
Biology, 2014 (2)). The K-index,
named after Kim Kardashian, famous for being famous, attempts to compare a
scientist’s fame by ranking them according to the number of twitter followers
they have, normalized by the amount of citations their scientific publications
have received.
I don’t know how I feel about this.
I think this is because I’ve always seen social media as
separate to the science that I do. Sure,
it has been the first to inform me of a celebrity’s arrest/death/misdemeanor, and
that quiz to find out which city I should really
be living in, but I’ve never used it to follow scientists in my field or to find
out how a conference I wasn’t able to attend is going…. I think this could be a
mistake, but am I happy with the idea of a K-index ranking how well I’m using
social media for my career? Probably not.
In the original article, Hall suggests that those with many
twitter followers should be back in the lab publishing more papers and has
constructed the K-index such that those with a high value have a lot of
followers but [relatively] few citations.
I think this misses the important role that social media is likely to
play in the future, especially when it comes to outreach and science
communication.
When you ignore the K-index and look at the scientists with
the most twitter followers (The
top 50 science stars of twitter), this is what you find:
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Brian Cox
Richard Dawkins
No great surprises, all known for their dedication to
science communication, and the use of twitter and other social media tools only
seems to be helping them. I wouldn’t
call their twitter fame unwarranted and I wonder what the point of the original
article by Hall was? As he has not
provided his K-index for any particular scientist we can only speculate on who
he thinks is a “Kardashian of science” with an “overblown public profile”.
He does have a valid point, which is that often, it is the
number of followers a person has rather than any insight or expertise they
possess that can dictate how far reaching their influence is, or who can “shout
loudest”; but doesn’t this mean we want more scientists on twitter, not
less?
The idea that taking the time to engage in the communication
of science is somehow reprehensible or that focusing your career in this way
makes you less of a scientist is deeply troubling. With how few of our politicians and business
leaders have the background in science needed to understand a research paper, scientists
who are willing to act as advisors and go-betweens are invaluable and this
shouldn’t just stop with those in power.
The communication of science to the whole population is also important;
social media is likely to be a key tool in reaching as many people as possible.
So instead of pointing to the Kardashians of science and
calling them outliers who need to spend more time on “real work”, it should be
acknowledged that the future of science communication is vital and its
superstars will have more twitter followers than you.
One last point to finish on is that both Hall’s K-index and
Science’s “top 50 stars on twitter” found that females were underrepresented
(as I assume other minorities are, although this was not addressed in either
article). This is hardly surprising,
given that women and minorities are underrepresented both online and in science
in general, but that this is cause for concern is hopefully something we can
all agree on. Making science welcoming
for all is something I want to be a part of and in order to reach this goal we
should be free to use every tool we can.
Social media can reach a lot of people, let’s use if for science.
1.
1. Jia You (2014). Who are the science stars of
Twitter?, Science, 345:6203
2.
2. Neil Hall (2014). The Kardashian index: a
measure of discrepant social media profile for scientist, Genome Biology,
15:424
