NEWS | I N D E P T H
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
Who are the science stars of Twitter? By Jia You
G
enomicist 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 in Genome 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 on1440
line, 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’s scientific celebrities The top 20 of the 50 most followed scientists on Twitter SCIENTIST
FOLLOWERS
CITATIONS
K-INDEX
EXPERTISE
Neil deGrasse Tyson
2,400,000
151
11129
Brian Cox
1,440,000
33,301
1188
Physicist
Richard Dawkins
1,020,000
49,631
740
Biologist
Ben Goldacre
341,000
1,086
841
Physician
Phil Plait
320,000
254
1256
Michio Kaku
310,000
5,281
461
Theoretical physicist
Sam Harris
224,000
2,416
428
Neuroscientist
Hans Rosling
180,000
1,703
384
Global health scientist
Tim Berners-Lee
179,000
51,204
129
Computer scientist
P. Z. Myers
155,000
1,364
355
Biologist
Steven Pinker
142,000
49,933
103
Cognitive scientist
Richard Wiseman
134,000
4,687
207
Psychologist
Astrophysicist
Astronomer
Lawrence M. Krauss
99,700
10,155
120
Theoretical physicist
Atul Gawande
96,800
13,763
106
Surgeon/public health scientist
Oliver Sacks
76,300
13,883
83
Neurologist
Dan Ariely
73,000
16,307
76
Psychologist/ behavioral economist
Eric Topol
44,800
151,281
23
Geneticist
Brian Greene
38,700
11,133
45
Theoretical physicist
Marcus du Sautoy
34,200
1,461
77
Mathematician
Sean M. Carroll
33,200
14,208
36
Theoretical physicist
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
19 SEP TEMBER 2014 • VOL 345 ISSUE 6203
Published by AAAS
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on October 26, 2014
Science communicators and some highly cited researchers, but few women, make top 50 list
PHOTO: LOREDANA SIANI/OKAIROS
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 livetweeted 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. ■
Okairos uses a “wave bag” to shake up cells and produce small lots of vaccine.
INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Ebola vaccine: Little and late Scaling up production of Ebola vaccines and treatments will take many months By Jon Cohen
A
s the Ebola outbreak in West Africa accelerates, the containment measures that worked in the past, such as isolating those who are infected and tracing their contacts, clearly have failed. This has spurred hopes that biomedical countermeasures, such as monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, can help save lives and slow spread. But as President Barack Obama calls for an aggressive ramp up of the U.S. government’s response (see p. 1434), resolve is colliding with a grim reality: The epidemic is outpacing the speed with which drugs and vaccines can be produced. Administration officials have begun working with industry to speed manufacturing of experimental drugs and vaccines. “We’re trying to do everything we can to scale up product,” says Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But the logistical obstacles are huge, and makers are getting a late start. An Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Rixensart, Belgium, is the furthest along, having entered phase I human trials on 2 September. GSK has committed to manufacturing up to 10,000 doses of the vaccine, which consists of an Ebola surface protein stitched into a weakened chimpanzee adenovirus, by the end of the year. If it passes muster in the early studies, it could be given to health workers as soon as November. But hundreds of thousands of doses
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
would be needed to slow the outbreak. That “would take one-and-a-half years at the scale we’re working at,” says Ripley Ballou, who heads the Ebola vaccine program for GSK. The scientific hurdles are not particularly high. Companies have made similar vaccines at high volume, and animal studies have shown that Ebola virus is fairly easy to defeat with the proper immune response. “Although Ebola is a very scary, hemorrhagic virus, all you need is fairly modest neutralizing antibody response and you’re protected,” says John Eldridge, chief scientific officer at Profectus BioSciences, a Maryland and New York–based company making an Ebola vaccine that has struggled to attract funding. Ballou says GSK is considering several options for speeding production. But first the company wants to be sure that there’s a market for the vaccine. He says when the company contacted the World Health Organization at the start of this outbreak in March, no one showed much interest. “The answer was, ‘Thanks, we’ll get back to you.’ ” NewLink Genetics of Ames, Iowa, has a second vaccine in a phase I trial that consists of a crippled vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), which infects livestock, with the gene for the Ebola virus surface protein. Only 1500 doses exist. Profectus makes a similar vaccine that should be ready for human testing next June. Like GSK, Profectus needs a commitment from a funder before it can scale up production from the planned 5000 to 20,000 doses, Eldridge says. In principle, vaccine production is 19 SEP TEMBER 2014 • VOL 345 ISSUE 6203
Published by AAAS
1441
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
Who are the science stars of Twitter? By Jia You
G
enomicist 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 in Genome 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 on1440
line, 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’s scientific celebrities The top 20 of the 50 most followed scientists on Twitter SCIENTIST
FOLLOWERS
CITATIONS
K-INDEX
EXPERTISE
Neil deGrasse Tyson
2,400,000
151
11129
Brian Cox
1,440,000
33,301
1188
Physicist
Richard Dawkins
1,020,000
49,631
740
Biologist
Ben Goldacre
341,000
1,086
841
Physician
Phil Plait
320,000
254
1256
Michio Kaku
310,000
5,281
461
Theoretical physicist
Sam Harris
224,000
2,416
428
Neuroscientist
Hans Rosling
180,000
1,703
384
Global health scientist
Tim Berners-Lee
179,000
51,204
129
Computer scientist
P. Z. Myers
155,000
1,364
355
Biologist
Steven Pinker
142,000
49,933
103
Cognitive scientist
Richard Wiseman
134,000
4,687
207
Psychologist
Astrophysicist
Astronomer
Lawrence M. Krauss
99,700
10,155
120
Theoretical physicist
Atul Gawande
96,800
13,763
106
Surgeon/public health scientist
Oliver Sacks
76,300
13,883
83
Neurologist
Dan Ariely
73,000
16,307
76
Psychologist/ behavioral economist
Eric Topol
44,800
151,281
23
Geneticist
Brian Greene
38,700
11,133
45
Theoretical physicist
Marcus du Sautoy
34,200
1,461
77
Mathematician
Sean M. Carroll
33,200
14,208
36
Theoretical physicist
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
19 SEP TEMBER 2014 • VOL 345 ISSUE 6203
Published by AAAS
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on October 26, 2014
Science communicators and some highly cited researchers, but few women, make top 50 list
PHOTO: LOREDANA SIANI/OKAIROS
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 livetweeted 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. ■
Okairos uses a “wave bag” to shake up cells and produce small lots of vaccine.
INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Ebola vaccine: Little and late Scaling up production of Ebola vaccines and treatments will take many months By Jon Cohen
A
s the Ebola outbreak in West Africa accelerates, the containment measures that worked in the past, such as isolating those who are infected and tracing their contacts, clearly have failed. This has spurred hopes that biomedical countermeasures, such as monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, can help save lives and slow spread. But as President Barack Obama calls for an aggressive ramp up of the U.S. government’s response (see p. 1434), resolve is colliding with a grim reality: The epidemic is outpacing the speed with which drugs and vaccines can be produced. Administration officials have begun working with industry to speed manufacturing of experimental drugs and vaccines. “We’re trying to do everything we can to scale up product,” says Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But the logistical obstacles are huge, and makers are getting a late start. An Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Rixensart, Belgium, is the furthest along, having entered phase I human trials on 2 September. GSK has committed to manufacturing up to 10,000 doses of the vaccine, which consists of an Ebola surface protein stitched into a weakened chimpanzee adenovirus, by the end of the year. If it passes muster in the early studies, it could be given to health workers as soon as November. But hundreds of thousands of doses
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
would be needed to slow the outbreak. That “would take one-and-a-half years at the scale we’re working at,” says Ripley Ballou, who heads the Ebola vaccine program for GSK. The scientific hurdles are not particularly high. Companies have made similar vaccines at high volume, and animal studies have shown that Ebola virus is fairly easy to defeat with the proper immune response. “Although Ebola is a very scary, hemorrhagic virus, all you need is fairly modest neutralizing antibody response and you’re protected,” says John Eldridge, chief scientific officer at Profectus BioSciences, a Maryland and New York–based company making an Ebola vaccine that has struggled to attract funding. Ballou says GSK is considering several options for speeding production. But first the company wants to be sure that there’s a market for the vaccine. He says when the company contacted the World Health Organization at the start of this outbreak in March, no one showed much interest. “The answer was, ‘Thanks, we’ll get back to you.’ ” NewLink Genetics of Ames, Iowa, has a second vaccine in a phase I trial that consists of a crippled vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), which infects livestock, with the gene for the Ebola virus surface protein. Only 1500 doses exist. Profectus makes a similar vaccine that should be ready for human testing next June. Like GSK, Profectus needs a commitment from a funder before it can scale up production from the planned 5000 to 20,000 doses, Eldridge says. In principle, vaccine production is 19 SEP TEMBER 2014 • VOL 345 ISSUE 6203
Published by AAAS
1441
