Intellectual synthesis in mentorship determines success in academic careers

Jean F Liénard,Titipat Achakulvisut,Daniel E Acuna,Stephen V David

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-07034-y

Abstract

As academic careers become more competitive, junior scientists need to understand the value that mentorship brings to their success in academia. Previous research has found that, unsurprisingly, successful mentors tend to train successful students. But what characteristics of this relationship predict success, and how? We analyzed an open-access database of 18,856 researchers who have undergone both graduate and postdoctoral training, compiled across several fields of biomedical science with an emphasis on neuroscience. Our results show that postdoctoral mentors were more instrumental to trainees’ success compared to graduate mentors. Trainees’ success in academia was also predicted by the degree of intellectual synthesis between their graduate and postdoctoral mentors. Researchers were more likely to succeed if they trained under mentors with disparate expertise and integrated that expertise into their own work. This pattern has held up over at least 40 years, despite fluctuations in the number of students and availability of independent research positions.

Highlights

As academic careers become more competitive, junior scientists need to understand the value that mentorship brings to their success in academia
To study the influence of graduate versus postdoctoral mentorship on trainee success, we focused our study on “triplets” of researchers, each consisting of a trainee, a graduate mentor, and a postdoctoral mentor
Using publication similarity as a measure of intellectual overlap between researchers, we considered its relationship to the odds of becoming a mentor, that is, for the trainee to continue in academia and themselves train at least graduate student or postdoctoral fellow

Summary

Introduction

As academic careers become more competitive, junior scientists need to understand the value that mentorship brings to their success in academia. Most scientific researchers spend several years training under just one or two graduate and/or postdoctoral mentors, suggesting that this small number of relationships can have large impact on their subsequent career. Academic proliferation gives insight into two aspects of research careers: (1) attrition rate, where a researcher who has never mentored someone else probably does not hold a permanent position, and (2) scientific proficiency, where more successful mentors have a greater number of trainees. This second effect might reflect that greater fame attracts more students, greater financial resources allows more hires, and a virtuous circle where trainees contribute back to the prestige of the mentor through collaboration and contribution to an extended social network throughout their own careers[2]. Our objective was to uncover how patterns in the network of mentors and protégés shape their academic success: to what extent does mentorship impact the future career of trainees? What is the relative influence of social versus intellectual factors on mentoring relationships? Do graduate or postdoctoral mentors have a greater impact on trainee careers? What are the long-term temporal trends that influence the success of trainees?

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