Kardashian Index Calculator

The Kardashian Index is a measure of the discrepancy between an academic's social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.

The Kardashian Index (K-index) can be calculated as follows:

K - index = F (a) / F (c)

F (a) is the actual number of Twitter followers of academic X. F (c) is the number academic X should have given their citations C; given a trend identified in the original paper, it is calculated as:

F = 43.3C0.32

The author of the index says that "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. ... those people whose K-index is greater than 5 can be considered 'Science Kardashians'.

Input details below to calculate a K-index value:

No. Twitter followers by Twitter handler Integer value : No. citations by Google Scholar User ID Integer value :

Note: Google Scholar User ID is extracted from the URL of a scholar's page: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=hXEZnsUAAAAJ

This script makes use of twitter-api-php and PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser