The Kardashian Index (K-Index), named after media personality Kim Kardashian, is a satirical measure of the discrepancy between a scientist's social media profile and publication record.
which is derived from the Twitter accounts and citation counts of a "randomish selection of 40 scientists" in 2014.
Hall wrote:[1] I propose that all scientists calculate their own K-index on an annual basis and include it in their Twitter profile.
Not only does this help others decide how much weight they should give to someone’s 140 character wisdom, it can also be an incentive – if your K-index gets above 5, then it’s time to get off Twitter and write those papers.
[3] Many jocular indices of scientific productivity were proposed in the immediate aftermath of publication of the K-Index paper.
[2] The Tesla Index measured social isolation of scientists relative to their productivity, named after Nikola Tesla, whose work was hugely influential, while he remained a social recluse.
[2][5] In 2022, John Ioannidis authored a paper in The BMJ arguing that signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic were shunned as a fringe minority by those in favor of the John Snow Memorandum.
According to him, the latter used their large numbers of followers on Twitter and other social media and op-eds to shape a scientific "groupthink" against the former, who had less influence.
[8][9] The proposal of the K-Index has been interpreted as a criticism to the assumption that scientists should have a social media impact at all, while in reality, social media footprint has no correlation to the scientific quality or scientific impact.