Who are the science stars of Twitter?
Genomicist Neil Hall sparked an online tempest this summer by proposing a “Kardashian Index,” or K-index—a comparison of a scientist's number of Twitter followers with their citations. Scientists with a high score on the index, named after the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, one of the most popular celebrities on the social media platform, should “get off Twitter” and write more papers, suggested Hall, who works at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.
Though Hall says he meant his K-index lightheartedly, his article inGenome Biology sparked a Twitter storm of criticism. So just who are the Kardashians of science, and is Hall's criticism justified? Hall tactfully declined to provide a K-index for anyone specific, but Science was curious about the names and the numbers. We have compiled a list of the 50 most followed scientists on the social media platform and their academic citation counts—and calculated their K-index.
Rather than identifying “Science Kardashians”—those who are, as Hall put it, “famous for being famous”—the list reveals that a majority of science Twitter stars spend much, if not all, of their time on science communication. For them, Twitter popularity can amplify their efforts in public outreach. A case in point is Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and host of the science TV show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. With more than 2.4 million followers and fewer than 200 citations, the astrophysicist is the top-ranking celebrity scientist on Twitter—and has the highest K-index of anyone on the list. Yet few would consider his Twitter fame unwarranted.
Although the index is named for a woman, Science's survey highlights the poor representation of female scientists on Twitter, which Hall hinted at in his commentary. Of the 50 most followed scientists, only four are women. Astronomer Pamela Gay of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, whose more than 17,000 Twitter followers put her 33rd on the list, says that doesn't surprise her because society still struggles to recognize women as leaders in science. Female scientists are also more likely to face sexist attacks online, she adds. “At some point, you just get fed up with all the ‘why you are ugly’ or ‘why you are hot’ comments.”
Twitter stardom need not exclude research achievements, as our top 50 Twitter list shows. Many have thousands of citations and seven of the people listed also appear on two recent citation-based rankings of influential scientists. (Find an expanded story, the full top 50 list, and details on how we compiled the story's data at http://scim.ag/Twitterstars.) Even so, most high-performing scientists have not embraced Twitter. Science sampled Twitter usage among 50 randomly chosen living scientists from Scholarometer's top 100 authors ranking. Only a fifth of the scientists have an identifiable Twitter profile.
Even some who do dislike the medium. Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the highest ranking chemist on Scholarometer's list, considers Twitter a waste of precious time that he'd much prefer spending on reading and writing scientific papers. “A lot of social media is … time spent aggrandizing one's accomplishment,” says Mirkin, who registered on Twitter just to keep up with his son's tennis scores.
So why do the highly cited researchers who are also Twitter science stars make the time to engage in social media? Geneticist Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California (17th place; 44,800 followers), who boasts more than 150,000 citations, says he once thought the social media platform was only for “silly stuff” like celebrity news. Then he tried Twitter during a TEDMED conference in 2009, as a tool to gauge reactions to his talk. Now, he starts his workday browsing through his Twitter feed for news and noteworthy research in his field. During the day, he checks Twitter several times and spends another 10 to 20 minutes on an evening roundup. “It actually may be the most valuable time [I spend] in terms of learning things that are going on in the world of science and medicine,” says Topol, who reciprocates by daily tweeting papers, presentations, and more to his followers.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University (36th; 15,500 followers) views Twitter as a natural extension of his public outreach efforts, which include hosting the PBS science documentary, This Emotional Life. “It's another teaching tool,” he says.
Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis (25th; 24,900 followers), says that consistently tweeting ongoing research at his lab has helped attract graduate students as well as two grants for science communication. He suggests an active social media presence might even aid applications for research funding, as it demonstrates a commitment to public outreach. But the spontaneity of Twitter can backfire, too. Eisen, for one, has live-tweeted brusque criticism at academic conferences that came back to bite him. “You can seem like a jerk, an idiot, or both,” he says.
The K-index gets it wrong by suggesting that science communication and research productivity are incompatible, says Albert-László Barabási, a network theorist at Northeastern University in Boston who studies social media. Research on altmetrics—alternative metrics for measuring scientific impact—has found no link between social media metrics such as number of tweets and traditional impact metrics such as citations, he says. “We should really not mix the two … because they really probe different aspects of a scientist's personality.”
For his part, Hall says others have read too much into his satire, which originated after seeing conference organizers factor Twitter follower numbers into speaker considerations. “I don't mean to criticize anyone for having a lot of Twitter followers,” he says. “My criticism is only of using it as a metric on research scientists.”
It might be premature, in any case, for the scientific community to worry about “Science Kardashians” when it faces a more pressing challenge of staying relevant in public discussions. Even Tyson's Twitter popularity is dwarfed by that of the real Kim Kardashian, who boasts 10 times as many followers.
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