The SI Appendix presents details on data and measures. We measured protégé success using a variety of measures including 1) scientific prizewinning ( 14, 15), 2) election to the NAS ( 16), and 3) superstardom-a scientist who is a prizewinner, NAS member, and in the top 25% of citations in their field. We merged genealogy data with a scholar’s discipline, publications, coauthors, citations, sex, research topics, and institutional affiliation using Web of Science and Microsoft Academic Graph databases. Genealogical data on mentors and protégés come from the ProQuest PhD Dissertation & Thesis databank (PQTD), an official record of advisor–student relationships taken from PhD theses, and is supplemented with crowdsourced data from and the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP). Our analyses follow 37,157 mentors and protégés who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, and physics between 19. Using these datasets, we conducted one of the largest multidisciplinary investigations of mentorship and mentee performance. ![]() ![]() New longitudinal datasets from the genealogy and academic records of 10s of thousands of scholars permit new exploration of the link between mentorship and protégé success. Data limitations have also created a preponderance of findings from self-report surveys rather than actual performance ( 9, 13). However, the systematic nature of these cases remains an open question ( 10) with mentorship sometimes being faulted for involving favoritism ( 11) or “cloning” ( 12). Funding agencies also advocate for strong mentorship: A study of NIH awards in medicine reveals that 47% of principal investigators received funds for mentorship ( 8, 9). The NSF reported that “breakthrough scientists” cite “an intimate association with a great inspiring teacher” as a dominant factor in their success ( 7). Socrates mentored Plato, who mentored Aristotle, who mentored Alexander the Great-a genealogical pattern found among some Renaissance scholars, such as Galileo, Viviani, Barrow, and Newton, as well as a handful of modern-day Nobelists ( 3, 5, 6). Within the bounds of this debate, there are many anecdotes but limited research on whether mentorship-according to either definition-impacts protégé success ( 3 – 5). “The value of an education,” he concluded, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks” ( 2). Albert Einstein countered that mentors should promote new thinking in students. Thomas Edison believed that mentors impart to students a subject matter’s essential facts and formulas in aid of preparing students to be on the leading edge of application. In 1921, two scientists debated mentorship’s role in the development of scientific talent ( 1). Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors’ research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé’s likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Our models explain 34–44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. Because the mentor’s ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize’s conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 19 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery.
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