Abstract
Advising and mentoring Ph.D. students is an increasingly important aspect of the academic profession. We define and interpret a family of metrics (collectively referred to as “a-indices”) that can potentially be applied to “ranking academic advisors” using the academic genealogical records of scientists, with the emphasis on taking into account not only the number of students advised by an individual, but also subsequent academic advising records of those students. We also define and calculate the extensions of the proposed indices that account for student co-advising (referred to as “adjusted a-indices”). In addition, we extend some of the proposed metrics to ranking universities and countries with respect to their “collective” advising impacts, as well as track the evolution of these metrics over the past several decades. To illustrate the proposed metrics, we consider the social network of over 200,000 mathematicians (as of July 2018) constructed using the Mathematics Genealogy Project data.
Highlights
In recent years, universities and other research institutions have put a lot of emphasis on assessing and enhancing the productivity of their faculty
Results for MathGenealogy dataset we present the results obtained on the MathGenealogy network using the metrics proposed above
A ranking of top academic advisors with an a-index of at least 10, many of whom are prominent mathematicians from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Summary
Universities and other research institutions have put a lot of emphasis on assessing and enhancing the productivity of their faculty. This paper takes a further step towards studying and ranking academic advising impact using MathGenealogy social network. Definition 3 (a1-index) The a1-index of an individual i is the harmonic centrality of the corresponding node i in the directed network: a1(i) = Ch(i) = j∈N d(1i,j).
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