2010/06/01 by R. Dean Malmgren, Julio M. Ottino, Luı́s A. Nunes Amaral +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Education, Achievement, and Giftedness #Higher Education Research Studies #Mentoring and Academic Development #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nature09040
published as Nature 465: 622-626 (2010) · 23 pages double-spaced, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2010/06/01 · arxiv created 2010/06/11 · arxiv updated 2010/06/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The role of mentorship on protege performance is a matter of importance to academic, business, and governmental organizations. While the benefits of mentorship for proteges, mentors and their organizations are apparent, the extent to which proteges mimic their mentors' career choices and acquire their mentorship skills is unclear. Here, we investigate one aspect of mentor emulation by studying mentorship fecundity---the number of proteges a mentor trains---with data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which tracks the mentorship record of thousands of mathematicians over several centuries. We demonstrate that fecundity among academic mathematicians is correlated with other measures of academic success. We also find that the average fecundity of mentors remains stable over 60 years of recorded mentorship. We further uncover three significant correlations in mentorship fecundity. First, mentors with small mentorship fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 37% larger than expected mentorship fecundity. Second, in the first third of their career, mentors with large fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 29% larger than expected fecundity. Finally, in the last third of their career, mentors with large fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 31% smaller than expected fecundity.