The Kardashian index is a semi-humorous metric invented to the reveal how much trust you should put in a scientist with a public image.

In ‘The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists‘, the author writes:

I am concerned that phenomena similar to that of Kim Kardashian may also exist in the scientific community. I think it is possible that there are individuals who are famous for being famous

and

a high K-index is a warning to the community that researcher X may have built their public profile on shaky foundations, while a very low K-index suggests that a scientist is being undervalued. Here, I propose that those people whose K-index is greater than 5 can be considered ‘Science Kardashians’

Your Kardashian index is calculated from your number of twitter followers and the number of citations your scholarly papers have. You can use the ‘Kardashian Index Calculator‘ to find out your own Kardashian Index, if you have a twitter account and a Google Scholar profile.

The implication of the Kardashian index is that the Foundation of someone’s contribution to public debate about science is their academic publishing. But public debate and scholarly debate are rightfully different things, even if related. To think that only scientists should be listened to in public debate is to think that other forms of skill and expertise aren’t relevant, including the skill of translating between different domains of expertise.

Communicating scientific topics, explaining and interpreting new findings and understanding the relevance of science to people’s lives and of people’s lives to science are skills in itself. The Kardashian Index ignores that, and so undervalues it.

Full disclosure: My Kardashian Index is 25.