Twitter patter.

The sound of someone climbing the academic ranks in 2019. Everyone in medicine knows that an academic accomplishment is truly valuable only once it has been quantified with a number: MCAT score, USMLE score, board score. To avoid losing all semblance of worth after breaking free from standardized testing in your fourth decade of life, certain metrics such as the h-index were derived to measure impact among peer-reviewed publications. Alternative metrics, or “altmetrics,” aim to capture the influence of works on scientific discourse outside of citations in medical journals. In an attempt to stay relevant, the latest altmetrics tout tweets as important avenues for scientific dissemination, though its very own twitter response suggests it may have missed its mark. TBL: A solid resolution for 2019 academia is to focus more on practical implementation of scientific measures and less on measuring scientists. | Sturges, Elsevier 2018