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A genomics professor has devised a tongue-in-cheek measure of scientific work vs. scientific recognition.
Neil Hall, a genomics professor with the University of Liverpool, has kicked up a bit of an Internet storm. He's written a paper and has had it published in the journal Genome Biology, suggesting (with tongue firmly in cheek) that some scientists are getting more attention than they deserve, due to their heightened social standing. He's even come up with a way to measure it, his so-called "Kardashian-index" or more simply, K-index-it's derived by noting how many people are following the scientist on Twitter and then dividing that number by followers the scientist probably should have due to papers written and associated citations for it, i.e. proof of actual work done.
The index is named after Kim Kardashian (and her family) of course, who have become famous for being famous -- they don't actually do anything. And that's the point of Hall's paper-is the scientific community in danger of being overrun by scientists who make a lot of noise in the social media world, but do very little actual scientific work? Hall notes that there seems to be times when scientists are asked to give talks at conferences based more on their social standing than on work they have actually done. This begs the question, are scientists (regardless of field) just as susceptible to the cult of celebrity as everyone else and if so, is it harming science?
Full text: http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/7/424
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday August 06 2014, @11:39PM
It's not the importance conference or other entities place on specific persons or the amount of work but rather the impact the work has on civilization that matters at least scientifically. The measurement method used indicate that the only hard working scientists existed before twitter due to numerous papers and no followers..
Perhaps a better score would be accomplished by counting mentioning in newspapers and conferences vs amount of papers vs citation of produced papers. The latter perhaps is a better indicator of useful work rather hard work that leads to very little results.
Most people tend to look at the content of a book and who wrote it rather than the number of pages. And as with computers, more MHz doesn't equate to more computations.