The Kardashian Index (K-Index), named after Kim Kardashian, is a satirical measure of the discrepancy between a scientist's social media profile and publication record.Proposed by Neil Hall in 2014, the measure compares the number of followers a research scientist has on Twitter to the number of citations they have for their peer-reviewed work.
The relationship between the number of Twitter followers
and the number of citations
is described as:
which is derived from the Twitter accounts and citation counts of a "randomish selection of 40 scientists" in 2014.The Kardashian Index is thus calculated as:
where
is the actual number of Twitter followers of researcher
and
is the number that researcher should have, given their citations.
and the number of citations
is described as:
is the actual number of Twitter followers of researcher
and
is the number that researcher should have, given their citations.