My K-index

Matthew Hahn reminded me of a paper that proposed the “Kardashian index” for scientists. I don’t like the paper. It demeans outreach by implying that a high score (author Hall suggested more than 5) is an attention seeker who contributes little and should get back to the lab. There’s some pretty crummy sexist overtones in the choice of “Kardashian” as a descriptor. There was much criticism of this paper when came out, which I’m not going to rehash here.

But I didn’t know there was an online calculator. (Hat tip to Genome Biology.) And yes, I’m curious enough to enter in my numbers. My score was 17.46; the highest of anyone in Hahn’s Twitter thread by quite a ways.

I like trying to do outreach, and I know I do niche research. So this is not surprising to me.