Junior researchers ‘cited more if PhD supervisor is well known’

Early career researchers are much more likely to see their work cited if their PhD supervisors are well-known academics, according to a major study that suggests scholarly success is increasingly dependent on the status of one’s mentor.

In a paper published in the Royal Society journal Interface on 14 August, researchers survey the “academic genealogy” of more than 300,000 academics who published nearly 10 million papers to work out if the PhD graduates of highly cited authors are more widely cited than those whose mentors had a lower academic reputation – a phenomenon that has often been attributed to the “chaperone effect”.

A positive correlation – which the paper labelled the “academic Great Gatsby Curve” in reference to the term used in social sciences to describe the persistence of intergenerational income inequality – was observed in nearly all 22 disciplines analysed but was strongest in philosophy, mathematics and linguistics.

Political science, computing and anthropology also have high levels of “impact inequality”, states the paper, with the “most egalitarian citation distribution” found in experimental psychology, microbiology and evolutionary biology.

The “impact persistence” between PhD mentors and mentees was slightly higher if the supervisor was female, the researchers note, suggesting that this is “possibly owing to female mentors having a lasting positive impact on mentees or providing career development facilitation to a larger extent than male mentors”.

On the growing importance of having a well-known “academic parent”, the study suggests that “academia has become less open and more stratified over time, as newer protégé cohorts are characterised by lower intergenerational mobility than their predecessors”.

While the paper, which examines whether the citations gained by scholars in the five years after their PhD aligned with the citation profile of supervisors, accepts that “more successful mentors may have the privilege of being more selective in their choice of mentees, and vice versa, leading to a positive correlation between their impact”, it also argues that PhD students of well-known scholars are able to benefit from more networking opportunities.

“The transfer of academic status is instead grounded upon the inheritance of intangibles such as knowledge and visibility,” it says.

Given how “academic impact – as quantified by citations – is to some extent inherited”, the authors advise that “citation-based bibliometric indicators should be handled with care when used to assess the performance of academics”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com